NIST Tool Will Help Military Vehicles Fight Fires Using Less Harmful Chemicals

NIST Tool Will Help Military Vehicles Fight Fires Using Less Harmful Chemicals

Credit: U.S. Army


The U.S. Army uses NIST's PROFISSY computer program to help understand the performance and calculate the maximum charging pressure for this automatic fire extinguishing system, which protects the crew in an armored ground vehicle from explosive fires.



Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new, interactive spreadsheet that will help the U.S. military extinguish aircraft and vehicle fires using the latest environmentally friendly chemicals. 


While it may sound old-school, the spreadsheet is actually an upgrade of a NIST computer program that has helped protect valuable military assets and lives for several decades, despite being based on the vintage operating system MS-DOS. 


Fire protection is a major issue for military vehicles, which carry flammable fluids and can incur significant damage and casualties in accidents or combat. These vehicles carry hand-held fire extinguishers among other fire-suppression systems. A challenge is filling the bottles in such a way that the heat of a fire does not boost the pressure to the point of explosion. Calculations are needed to safely combine a fire suppressant agent with the nitrogen that expels and disperses the chemical. Another challenge is what agent to use. Efforts are underway to identify fire suppression agents with low or no global warming potential (GWP).


In the 1990s, NIST researchers developed a computer program for bottle-filling calculations called PROFISSY (PROperties of FIre Suppressant SYstems), which was distributed informally and has been widely used. But the old source code made it difficult to add new fluids. NIST has now replaced PROFISSY with a spreadsheet that has additional functionality and fl ..

Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.