Wireless Fire Detector

Effective fire suppression is a key contributor to aircraft survivability in a war zone. Many aircraft lack effective fire suppression in the wings and avionics bays because of cost and weight. Williams-Pyro will combine its expertise in fire detection, wireless technology, and low-power systems to solve all of the fire suppression issues in aircraft. These advances will make fire suppression feasible even for small aircraft such as UAVs. We will use commercial-off-the-shelf IEEE 802.15.4 wireless transceiver modules to demonstrate the wireless feature of our fire detectors. 802.15.4 is well-suited for our solution as it provides features such as low transmit power (<1mW), which prevents interference with aircraft’s systems; Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) encoding improves jam resistance; and provides worldwide unlicensed radio-frequency operation. In order to achieve the required 1ms transmit/receive latency, we will modify the existing protocol layers. Zigbee, an extension of IEEE802.15.4, allows a best-case latency of 15ms. Short latencies are a critical need in airborne fire detection and suppression, so a best-case latency of 1ms is required. To meet the latency requirement, Williams-Pyro will use a Hyperbee extension of IEEE802.15.4. The Hyperbee extension uses clock synchronization and channel characterization methods to improve latency to 1ms.