Classifications

• • G—PHYSICS
  • G08—SIGNALLING
  • G08B—SIGNALLING OR CALLING SYSTEMS; ORDER TELEGRAPHS; ALARM SYSTEMS
  • G08B17/00—Fire alarms; Alarms responsive to explosion
  • G08B17/12—Actuation by presence of radiation or particles, e.g. of infrared radiation or of ions
  • G08B17/125—Actuation by presence of radiation or particles, e.g. of infrared radiation or of ions by using a video camera to detect fire or smoke
• • G—PHYSICS
  • G08—SIGNALLING
  • G08B—SIGNALLING OR CALLING SYSTEMS; ORDER TELEGRAPHS; ALARM SYSTEMS
  • G08B29/00—Checking or monitoring of signalling or alarm systems; Prevention or correction of operating errors, e.g. preventing unauthorised operation
  • G08B29/18—Prevention or correction of operating errors
  • G08B29/185—Signal analysis techniques for reducing or preventing false alarms or for enhancing the reliability of the system
  • G08B29/188—Data fusion; cooperative systems, e.g. voting among different detectors
• • G—PHYSICS
  • G08—SIGNALLING
  • G08B—SIGNALLING OR CALLING SYSTEMS; ORDER TELEGRAPHS; ALARM SYSTEMS
  • G08B17/00—Fire alarms; Alarms responsive to explosion
  • G08B17/12—Actuation by presence of radiation or particles, e.g. of infrared radiation or of ions

Definitions

• the present invention relates to an apparatus for detecting symptoms of thermal and/or mechanical anomalies which can lead to the ignition of a fire.
• the invention aims to prevent destructive thermal accidents in industrial plants and more generally in high-energy plants, systems or machines and with a very serious outcome, highlighting well in advance, even hours or days, those signs of anomaly which if invisible or ignored, often lead high energy and high complexity systems silently and progressively towards the catastrophe limit, leaving little or no margins for emergency intervention.
• the present invention has the purpose of eliminating interventions in alarm or emergency conditions by moving them, so to speak, backwards in time, directing the plant manager in advance to guided preventive maintenance interventions at the point where an anomaly, even slight, is highlighted, avoiding thus risks of plant shutdown and liability and costs for damage to people or things.
• Asset Integrity Management or briefly AIM systems essentially consist of a database that collects all the construction information of the plant and, for each component of the latter, the conditions of use, the criticality of the part of the plant in which it is inserted and the risk that a failure in that component can trigger a sequence of events or failures in other parts or components of the system.
• the system records the frequency of faults or anomalies found in each component throughout the life of the system.
• the AIM system develops a strategy for preventive maintenance and maintenance interventions for the system operator, favoring the most critical and/or dangerous components.
• thermocouples or thermistors As regards the Early Warning detection in real time, the problem was tackled in various ways, with recourse at first to punctual measurements using thermocouples or thermistors, then in later periods by means of arrays of suspended bolometers and finally through the use of variations in the constants of electromagnetic propagation due to thermal gradients along optical fibers or continuous thermocouple linear sensors, distributed along lines considered critical.
• the object of the invention is to provide an apparatus for monitoring the beginning of the fires which allows the continuous detection of images in the thermal infrared, near infrared or briefly NIR and visible bands, merging and submitting them to an automatic visual analysis system able to classify the relevant events in the image with the aim of allowing early warning and risk management before the plant reaches a critical situation.
• the apparatus provides for the use of a plurality of point sensors 2 called Survey Cell to be installed near the area 4 to be monitored. These sensors 2 are connected to a system 6 capable of acquiring and managing the different thermal and visual flows generated by the sensors installed in the field.
• the main features of these sensors 2 are: - to be a remote temperature measuring instrument, with a small footprint and reduced electrical consumption, characterized by excellent technical characteristics, great strength and extreme resistance to shock and vibration. In this way it is possible to set up thermal surveillance devices with miniaturized instrumentation and extremely high reliability, capable of creating extremely effective control networks, consisting of several unattended positions, thus allowing a wide territorial coverage;
• System 6 is based on a technology for thermal surveillance, remote monitoring and generation of early alarms. This technology allows to automatically identify temperature differences of the order of a few tenths of a degree from distances of a few centimetres to distances of 300 meters.
• the automatic analysis system 6 is an artificial intelligence application equipped with means capable of:
• This last point is particularly critical and of significant importance, as it allows to signal, even with months in advance, the tendency for example to overheating due to friction in a mechanical part that is deteriorating, directing the maintenance teams to the verification and eventual replacement of the piece as normal maintenance and well before the phenomenon can lead to the deterioration of other parts, to the block of the system or worse to the ignition of a flame.
• System 6 is based on the criteria of the so-called “machine learning”, given the self-learning abilities according to the real situations to which it is exposed.
• the system 6 can be integrated with data from different devices and/or advanced sensors regarding both the process and the surrounding environment, e.g. humidity, temperature, etc. and is able to develop the statistical analysis of data, the definition of alarms and/or alert thresholds in a differentiated component by component, each subject to monitoring.
• the system performs:
• system 6 automatically provides the system manager with:
• the system automatically searches and defines the areas of interest 4 - the so-called "Zones" - conceptually in unlimited numbers.
• Each zone is characterized by homogeneous temperatures thus allowing the optimization of the identification of thermal anomalies.
• These zones uniquely describe each functional component present in the field of view of the sensors 2.
• System 6 houses inside any number of "independent observers", each of which is made using a layer of visual artificial intelligence, which analyse in parallel the video flows coming from the different sensors. Each of these artificial observers is instructed to detect a certain type of event, reasoning on single video frames, if the observer is instructed to detect instantaneous events, or on video track segments of longer or shorter duration, if the observer is instructed to detect situations related to temporal trends
• the artificial observatories are of the standard type, i.e. linked to the most common situations such as detection of alert and alarm thresholds, dimensional calculation of the areas on alert or in alarm, detection of anomalies as described above, and/or artificial observatories "custom -made "in response to particular requirements, concerning for example a portion or a particular element of the plant or a particular type of evolution or thermal trend considered dangerous or of interest: for example, detecting when a pipe or part of the plant has reached the thermal stability within a certain temperature range after an ignition transient; detect when a part of the system has reached a temperature low enough to allow operators to intervene in safe conditions, etc.
• the system 6 continuously monitors parts of the plant of particular interest by assigning graphic markers on the image, which allow the corresponding temperature trends to be extracted and analyzed in tabular or graphic form in time intervals of any duration, at the choice of the operator.
• Another important functionality of the system consists in the automatic pre-classification of the thermal image in order to present to the user all the parts of the image divided by homogeneous temperature classes. This function helps the user in the initial configuration phase, in defining and naming the areas of interest and discarding all parts of the image which are not significant or non-critical for the detection of fire prodromes.
• the system 6 is equipped with means, contained in a database 8, suitable for allowing the integration of the anomaly or alarm data in real time with static data relating to the standard use conditions and the criticality classification and/or risk for each component of the system. These means allow the operator of the system to make more detailed and timely decisions with respect to the use of static data or real-time data only.
• the further advantage of this variant consists in the fact of being able to associate to the signalling of thermal anomaly detected in a component of the plant also the immediate identification of what role said component plays and what risk it represents both in direct terms of damage, fire or plant stoppage, in terms of time, costs and complexity of restoration, and finally in terms of "cascade" damage possibly generated by the breakage of said component on all the other components dependent on it, e.g. a cooling pump of a thermal engine that goes out of order due to overtemperature, subsequently also compromising the integrity of the engine.

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• Engineering & Computer Science (AREA)
• Physics & Mathematics (AREA)
• General Physics & Mathematics (AREA)
• Multimedia (AREA)
• Business, Economics & Management (AREA)
• Emergency Management (AREA)
• Computer Security & Cryptography (AREA)
• Radiation Pyrometers (AREA)
• Alarm Systems (AREA)

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• 2020
  • 2020-01-13 EP EP20704351.4A patent/EP3912146A1/de active Pending
  • 2020-01-13 WO PCT/IB2020/050222 patent/WO2020148625A1/en active Search and Examination

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