Detecting Fires in Airliner Cargo Compartments

Sandia National Laboratories, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and NASA's Glenn Research Center have joined forces to improve the accuracy of fire detection systems in aircraft cargo compartments. False alarms occur about 100 times more often than alarms triggered by actual fire sources, resulting in costly and potentially dangerous emergency landings. Sandia's contribution is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model that accounts for heat, mass, and momentum transfer.