Industry: Technology Region: Slovakia Transaction Price: USD 1 million Transaction Method: Equity Financing

Description of Requirement:

A team of researchers from a technical university in Slovakia has developed a new, more cost-effective and flexible method for determining heat release ratesAgra Stock. The agency is looking for partners in the private sector to license the technology.Hyderabad Investment

details:

Heat release rates are fundamental fire characteristics of substances, materials and products. To date, three methods of heat release rate are known. One is based on the measurement of combustion product temperature. The main disadvantage of this method is the complexity of calibration (given by the dependence of heat capacity on temperature). The second is based on the mass loss measurement and the effective heat release rate multiplied by (obtained value). The main disadvantage of this method is the time lapse of the heat of effective combustion (of most organic polymers) (volatile compounds first, followed by carbon residues). The third method is based on measuring oxygen consumption (during complete combustion, 13.1 megajoules of heat are released for every kilogram of oxygen consumed). The main disadvantage of this method is the need for desiccants of combustion products (often containing carcinogenic moisture indicators). A common disadvantage of the methods described is that they can only be used in the laboratory (not in a real fire).

The research team from the Technical University of Bratislava, with a background in materials technology, has created a method to measure the heat release rate of substances, materials and products by means of flame photographs. Test samples with known reactivity levels to fire product and take pictures of its flame during the test. The photos taken are used for (convolutional) network training in one step. After training, the (convolutional) network was used to examine the claim responses to the fire test on test samples (from pictures of flames taken during the second step) in step two.

The agency is seeking industrial partners to license the further development and commercialization of the aforementioned technologies.

The main advantages of this method are:

1. Low price (camera and laptop with web software to measure heat release rate).

2. Measurement without chemicals.

3. Non-contact measurement (distance equal to tens to hundreds of fire diameters).

4Chennai Investment. Measurements can be performed in and out of the laboratory.