Nitrogen Gas and Potassium Iodide Fire Extinguisher Balls

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Fire extinguisher balls are handheld fire suppressants that automatically discharge once thrown to fire. Fire extinguisher balls are continuously being developed to further ensure safety, convenience, and fire-suppressing qualities. Consequently, various types with varying agents are found to have relative effectiveness and some, unfortunately, contribute to environmental issues (Thawad, 2011). With this said, the creation of fire extinguisher balls that make use of environmentally innocuous fire extinguishing agents are beneficial not only to the firefighting industry but also to the whole world.

METHODS

This research constructed a fire extinguisher ball which utilizes less harmful agents and, unlike conventional fire balls with only chemically-acting agents, uses both a chemically-acting agent (Potassium Iodide) and a physically-acting agent (Nitrogen gas). Three fire balls with varying concentrations of the said agents were prepared and tested in terms of weight, extinguishing time, discharge time, utilization time, and total area of extinguished fire. Two-way ANOVA test was used as the statistical test in the study with the amounts of Nâ‚‚ and KI as the independent variables.

RESULTS

Among the three devices, the fire ball with the highest concentration of Nâ‚‚ (0.55 g) received the fastest extinguishing time (2.34 s) while the fire ball with the lowest concentration of Nâ‚‚ had the lowest discharge time (0.99 s). The total utilization time, on the other hand, still favored the fire ball with the highest concentration of Nâ‚‚ resulting to a total time of 2.94 s. The result from the Two-way ANOVA test showed a higher obtained F-value (9.552094) compared to the P-value (0.057018) which meant that the null hypothesis will be rejected. The result of the statistical analysis shows that there is a significant difference between the extinguishing duration of each concentration set-up.

DISCUSSIONS

The results imply that there is a stronger inverse relationship between the concentration of Nâ‚‚ and the total extinguishing time compared to that of KI which proves that Nâ‚‚ can remove heat and oxygen while KI can interrupt chain reactions (Voelkert, 2015); hence, giving the use of environment-friendly agents more recognition. on the other hand, the device could still be improved by focusing on the area that it can extinguish so that it can deal with bigger areas similar to Elide Fire Ball's capacity of 8-10 square meters.