In Depth

Toolbox: Putting Out Fires

It wasn't your typical vendor meeting, reports a CSO colleague of mine.

By Todd Datz

January 01, 2005 — CSO — It wasn't your typical vendor meeting, reports a CSO colleague of mine. Instead of trying to get his arms around another new firewall or identity management application, he watched as Joe Ziemba, product manager of engineered systems at Tyco Fire and Security, poured watery-looking liquid over his laptop keyboard. Two-thousand dollars down the drain? Nope. The liquid evaporated instantly with no damage to the computer. Then, he held a container of some of the liquid next to a lit candle. The vapor from the liquid snuffed out the flame. Pretty cool stuff.

The cool stuff in question is a fire suppression system called Sapphire, from Tyco's Ansul division. Sapphire is a "clean agent," which means it can put out fires without harming electronic equipment or other items that might be damaged from the activation of a water sprinkler system. Think about a computer room; if a sprinkler system goes off and floods the servers and cables, that's one heck of a loss. Clean agents help minimize that risk.Halon Gets the BootClean agents have been around for decades. The most widely used one over the years has been Halon 1301. However, halons were found to harm the ozone layer and, under the Montreal Protocol of 1987 (which the United States signed on to), developed countries were required to phase out production of those gaseous agents by 1994. (The United States currently has no phase-out requirement for existing halon systems.)

Newer, more environmentally friendly agents appeared on the scene in the early 1990s, including FM-200 (from Great Lakes Chemical Corp.) and Inergen (also an Ansul product), both of which became popular replacements for halon systems.New Suppressant on the BlockSapphire is the latest iteration in clean agent technology. It uses Novec 1230, a fluid manufactured by 3M, which will not damage the ozone layer and has an atmospheric lifetime of just five daysthat is, it will remain in the atmosphere for five days, then disappear. (By contrast, halon has a lifetime of 65 years.)

Sapphire works like other clean agent systems, which are also known as total flooding systems. They are designed to detect fires before they ignite, using sensors that sense changes in temperature or smoke. If a system observes a problem, agents are released in gaseous form through fixed nozzles located in the ceiling, walls or under the floor.

Novec 1230 (a fluoroketone, for any chemistry majors out there) is an odorless, colorless fluid that is stored in tanks, usually located outside the protected room. It vaporizes upon release and is heavy enough to stay in the room and prevent anything from reigniting. (Other clean agents, such as Inergen and FM-200, are stored as gas, not liquidwhich requires more tanks.) "It dries 25 times more quickly than water," says Ziemba. "We can dip a painting or book in the stuff, pull it out, and it's dry with no damage." Sapphire also leaves no residue, making cleanup a relative breeze. It can work alongside a water sprinkler system or by itself.