A Full-Scale Prototype Multisensor System for Damage Control and Situational Awareness

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has developed a real-time, remote detection system for damage control and situational awareness, called “Volume Sensor”, as part of the Advanced Volume Sensor Task, an important element of the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, Future Naval Capabilities program, Advanced Damage Countermeasures. The objective of the Advanced Volume Sensor Task was to develop an affordable detection system that could identify shipboard damage control conditions and provide real-time threat level information for damage control events (such as flaming and smoldering fires, explosions, pipe ruptures, flooding, and gas releases) while eliminating the false alarms typical of fire detection systems in industrial environments. The approach was to build a multisensor, multicriteria system from low cost commercial-off-the-shelf hardware components integrated with intelligent software and data fusion algorithms. Two multicompartment prototype Volume Sensor systems were constructed at NRL and tested with a series of simulated damage control events at the Navy’s full-scale fire test facility, the ex-USS Shadwell in Mobile Bay, AL. Results from this test series indicate that the Volume Sensor Prototypes performed as well or better than commercial video image detection and point-detection systems in critical quality metrics for fire detection while also providing additional situational awareness for flooding scenarios, fire suppression system activations, and gas release events.