Suppose you had technology developed for NASA that could put out a fully engulfed car fire in 9 seconds? Think there might be a market for that? You’d be right. The U.S. military uses the system in Afghanistan, and the Navy uses it in the Middle East. Next up could be use of the system in small, remote Alaska villages with no trained firefighters. It’s called ultra-high pressure (UHP) firefighting, and Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center was at the center of its development through a program called Small Business Innovation Research. SBIR is designed specifically to spin off innovations made for NASA to industry.
NASA discusses dozens of innovations like these in each issue of its annual Spinoff magazine, and Marshall was involved in a half-dozen last year. Most of them are linked to its main mission of rocket propulsion.
Marshall technology infusion manager Lynn Garrison says the center has 81 contracts with industry now. Most of them aren’t especially large. The center’s total tech-infusion budget this year is only $8 million and a typical contract is under $1 million. But the money can make the difference between a successful product and just another good theory.
“People may think NASA only works with large companies,” Marshall engineer Huu Trinh said last week. “This is a good example to show we try to develop small companies, too.”
Trinh is a NASA technical monitor on projects like the one that led to ultra-high pressure firefighting. He’s worked with the involved Wisconsin company since 2000.
Orbital Technologies of Wisconsin spun off ultra-high pressure firefighting from its project to develop propulsion systems for advanced NASA rockets.
The company developed a way to inject liquid fuel into the rocket’s burn chamber in a rapid circular or “vortex” motion, Trinh said. The design confined the mixing and burning of the fuel to the core of the chamber, which kept it cooler and could lead to a longer engine lifespan.
To accomplish this, the company pressurized the fuel into fine droplets, and that same idea was the key to the fire-fighting technique. “The fire industry still has a mentality of ‘surround and drown’ – the more water you put around a fire, the faster the fire will go out,” company engineer Rory Groonwald told Spinoff . “But that is not necessarily true.”
The system developed by Orbitec subsidiary HMA instead sends a spray of fine droplets toward a fire. On contact with the flames, the fine droplets create four times the surface area of a typical hose burst.
In one test fire at Vandenberg Air Force Base, a fire hose needed 220 gallons of water and nearly two minutes to put out a fire in a test house. The HMA system did it in 17 seconds using just 13.6 gallons of water. “It sucked the life out of the fire and did it faster than anything I’ve ever seen before,” base fire department Capt. Devin Misiewicz told Spinoff.
What about NASA? Has it used the company’s technology in rocket engines? Not yet, Trinh said. It needs more development. But that hasn’t stopped the spinoff from making a difference in the firefighting world.
NASA still considers the project a success. Using a little government seed money to help small businesses develop useful products is part of the agency’s mission and the mission of other government agencies that have similar SBIR programs.
What did the partnership with NASA mean to the company? “Instant credibility,” said one manager.
How much money are we talking about? The entire NASA budget for SBIR programs is $154 million this year. Among the other Marshall projects that $154 million helped buy are new alloy fans to keep fresh air circulating in tunnels, new hypoallergenic skin care products and “fine-tuned” anti-cancer drugs, and new ventilator technologies for emergency care on battlefields and other extreme conditions.
Source: al.com