Concept Design of a Quick Response System to Avoid Fatalities in Post-Collision Fire Due to Fuel-Tank Damage

This paper is an attempt to address one of the causes of catastrophic failures attributed to incidents of fire and smoke in commercial vehicles during last few years in China and India which have resulted in a considerable number of casualties. Some of the accidents encountered happened because of a crash with fire originating from the fuel tank. This was attributed to fuel leakage and excessive heat produced due to friction of debris with the fuel tank which happened within a few seconds of the crash.

A Fuel-Tank Safety ECU for preventing such fire-mishaps shall be designed for spotting this failure and activating prevention methods in order. This ECU shall process the data coming from temperature-sensor and fuel-pressure sensor placed on the fuel tank of the vehicle. This real-time data shall be compared with the previously computed values and then the delta-differentiated value shall be used to conclude the likelihood of a fire-occurrence. This ECU shall then timely activate the fire-preventive agents along with sounding an audio-visual alert to notify the vehicle driver and passengers. This condition shall also be reported to the Body Control ECU by raising a fire-prevention safety signal flag. This shall enable the Body Control ECU to open emergency exits automatically for safe evacuation of the occupants. The system presented in this paper helps to find out the leakage in fuel tank as well as the likelihood of fire in its initial stages and take the necessary preventive actions, thus saving lives of many.