Fike has the expertise, experience and products to safely protect nearly any processing facility, and most importantly, its people, from a combustible dust explosion. Fike can guide your facility through the following steps to provide comprehensive combustible dust explosion protection and prevention.
Transcript, in order of appearance: Rich Huff, Zak Al-Shawish
Combustible dust can be a problem in a lot of different industries: food and beverage industry, pharmaceuticals, chemical and many others. A lot of wood processing. Any carbon-based dust and sometimes even plastics and metals. If they are in dust form, they are susceptible to explosions.
Explosion suppression systems have to be very fast in order to do their job. From the time an explosion starts, a tiny spark or whatever the ignition source is, will light the suspended fuel, that suspended dust in the air, there will be a fireball that starts to grow and a pressure wave coming out of it as well.
We use a standard pressure detector to monitor the explosions, coupled with a very fast controller. We are taking a reading off of that pressure detector 4,000 times per second. Within a millisecond when we see a pressure rise, we can make a decision on whether or not that is an actual explosion, and react to it by firing one of our output devices: a suppressant container or closing different isolation barriers.
We have to be very fast and work within milliseconds to prevent the explosion from spreading or creating an overpressure condition.
Fike continually improves our explosion protections solutions through new product development. We do a lot of testing in our remote testing facility to understand the science behind explosions and we can then create the products that best control and protect people from those explosions.
The risk is absolutely real and when you look to some of these events that have occurred in the past, these are human beings, these are people who have lost their lives who will never get to back home to their families. And for us, that is unacceptable and completely avoidable. It’s our passion here. It’s our obligation to ensure events like these are mitigated to the best of our ability.
We employ some of the best engineers and scientists I believe in all of the world. And they are constantly working to try to make these incremental improvements that may not seem like much from a business standpoint, but it makes the product better, it makes the product more reliable, and at the end of the day, it will help us save lives.
