Commercial and industrial property insurer FM Global has developed a new design for automatic fire sprinkler protection beyond what can be addressed with current commercially available sprinklers. The sprinklers are designed to activate due to their enhanced sensitivity to thermal radiation from flames and would be suitable for particular applications where a new, specialized sprinkler design would be beneficial, such as sprinkler protection beneath grated mezzanines and special fire hazards such as covered open yard storage.

Among the key findings from FM Global’s scientific research:

1. There are scenarios where traditional sprinklers developed for ceiling-level protection might not activate in a timely manner, or not at all, because hot gasses from a fire never reach them, despite a fire being physically close.
2. Sprinklers can be designed with enhanced sensitivity to thermal radiation to provide adequate response to the heat from flames of a nearby fire.
3. The sprinklers designed for this study were reliably capable of addressing specialized fire protection scenarios.

The complete findings are available free of charge in a new research technical report titled; Radiation-Activated Sprinklers  www.fmglobal.com/researchreports.