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applications II
Applications II
At around 6:03 am on Sunday morning, the 11th of December, 2005, a massive fuel:air explosion occurred in a huge liquid fuel products storage depot, at Buncefield.
(photo: AP) Al-Ahram
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The fire at Buncefield: example of the contributions UAVs could have made… |
At around 6:03 am on 11th December, 2005, a massive fuel:air explosion occurred in a huge liquid fuel products storage depot, at Buncefield.
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Flames and smoke rise from the Buncefield oil depot, near Hemel Hempstead, England, on Monday. Firefighters attacked an inferno raging at the oil depot north of London, extinguishing half of the tank fires with sprays of chemical foam (photo: AP) Al-Ahram. |
Aerial view of Buncefield Oil and Fuel Depot at Hemel Hempstead, with the explosion and main destruction area marked in red. Aerial photo data courtesy of www.getmapping.com COPYRIGHT © Getmapping plc. |
UAVs could be used to generate very useful composite images of the incident, using:
- high resolution visual imaging, using a 10 MPixel digital camera with digital correction for lens distortion, showing the smoke and flames, as seen above
- thermal imaging to “see through” the smoke and view the flames and create a colour coded map, showing all the temperatures in the image to within 1ºC
- Interferometric Synthetic Aperture RADAR (ISAR, see Appendix 5 for technical details) to “see through” both smoke and flames and image the underlying terrain, including any bodies, vehicles, debris and the level of the flammable liquids in the open, damaged, storage silos.
Additionally, UAVs could contribute by:
- continuously monitoring the fire
- continuously monitoring the effectiveness of the fire fighting activities
- dropping canisters of very cold liquid nitrogen, to both cool the fire and reduce its intensity, by starving the fire of oxygen
- flying through the smoke plume, to gather samples for subsequent analysis
- monitoring the extent of the spreading smoke plume
- watching for any looting that might occur, or, unauthorised entry to the danger zone
- generating detailed 3D aerial imagery, to gauge the extent of the damage.
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