False alarms offshore
30 September 2010
Flame and gas hazards are not the only dangers rig and platform workers need protection from – false alarms pose dangers to workers and can be expensive in production losses. Depending on the detection technology used, false alarms can arise from a variety of situations: welding and reflected sunlight, for example.
False alarms offshore
False alarms add their own brand of safety issues. Workers can be injured as they respond to the false alarms. Conversely, if workers hear enough false alarms, their response time might decrease.
In addition, false alarms cost time and money: lost production dollars, lost work time for crews, and of course overtime pay for the folks who get pulled from sleep at 3AM to address the false-alarm call.
The first step to avoid the false-alarm problem– Look for a flame detector that uses multispectrum infrared technology. In this application, the Detector Electronics model X3301 provides better performance and fewer false alarms than a standard ultraviolet (UV) detector.
The X3301 infrared detector uses three sensors at three different wavelengths, a sophisticated 32-bit microprocessor, sophisticated software algorithms, and a calibrated optical check verifying proper operation for each sensor. It can ignore modulated infrared sources, reflected sunlight, welding, lightning, and other non-fire sources in its field of view – and yet still retain its alarm capabilities.
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