The International Water Mist Association (IWMA) will hold its next annual conference in Copenhagen, the 17th-18th September 2008. DBI will be co-organiser. As Henrik Bygbjerg of DBI and a member of IWMA’s board tell us, this was decided at the most recent IWMA Conference, which took place on 28-30 of November 2007 in Paris.
Henrik took part in the conference in Paris along with his DBI colleague Bjarne P. Husted, who recently obtained a ph.d. for his research into water mist at Lund University.
The conference reflected the trend of increased use of water mist at the expense of traditional sprinkler systems and gas extinguishment systems. This is what Bjarne Husted, who contributed to the conference himself with the results of his ph.d. work, tells us.
Among examples of the new projects presented at the conference, he mentions a contribution on protection of the French national archives. For this project, a test program was set up whereby a number of archive configurations were tested with three different water mist systems. Two of the three systems passed all the tests.
From Sweden, the Technical Research Institute, SP, contributed with a paper on how you can protect old wooden churches with water mist. Among the topics focused on in the project was the potential water damage that could be caused to the churches’ irreplaceable painted wooden panels.
Besides Bjarne Husted’s contribution, DBI was represented in connection with Danfoss-Semco A/S with a paper on the protection of glass panels with water mist. Erik Christensen, Danfoss-Semco A/S, presented at the conference about this project that was carried out at the huge Alsion complex in Sønderborg, Denmark.
For the project, a number of full-scale watermist tests were conducted at DBI, including tests on water mist protection of a glassing structure for compartmentation of an emergency escape route within the building.
Fire protection of tunnels with water mist was also on the agenda, and here, participants had the opportunity to observe some water mist tests at the French Building Research Institute (CSTB) testing facility outside Paris. It was demonstrated how water mist can fight fire in a 1:3 – downscaled test tunnel.