Perimeter Solutions Partners with Voltree Power on Wildfire Prevention
Perimeter Solutions has partnered with Voltree Power to offer products for wildfire prevention. Perimeter Solutions, a producer of fire retardants, foams and water enhancing gels for managing wildland, industrial, and municipal applications will integrate Voltree's energy harvesting and wireless sensor technology to enhance its wildfire prevention solutions for utilities, railroads, and related industries.
The announcement comes just months after investigators found that several of the Northern California wildfires resulted from utility system failures. Fires caused by utility and railroad operations and equipment and system failures have become a growing issue in California and other fire-prone states in the Western US.
Perimeter Solutions, makers of PHOS-CHEK® Long-Term Fire Retardant, used by the USDA Forest Service, CalFire and many other fire management agencies around the world, offers an effective, proven solution to help prevent fires from sparks caused by equipment failures and regular operations.
Voltree Power of Canton, MA, offers practical, cost-effective and innovative sensing solutions that aid natural resource preservation, as well as the environmental and agricultural industries. The company provides environmental monitoring for local susceptibility to wildfires. Most importantly, Voltree has developed a technology in stealth that provides real-time plant fuel-moisture levels, the holy grail of environmental monitoring, as well as dead fuels status through vegetative bioelectrical signals.
Voltree's Javelin Lifetime product (see field test of product-above right) features sensors that measure moisture levels in live plants and trees and provide definitive data of heated trees that are dead fuel although may appear alive. Both fuel moisture and dead fuel levels are leading contributors to the most recent wildfires.
They are also contributing factors in determining the fire rating danger system. Low moisture levels indicate a greater potential for fire. According to Perimeter Solutions, the technology monitors, in real time, high fire danger and is far superior to standard, map-based monitoring.
"Voltree Power's patented technology expands our ability to provide a complete fire prevention solution," explained Edward Goldberg CEO of Perimeter Solutions. "This technology provides, at a much more local level, the insights and data necessary to identify high fire danger levels and determine where the fuel treatment is urgently needed."
Perimeter Solutions will highlight the advantages of the integrated real-time sensing technology with Voltree Power at the upcoming Wildfire Technology Innovation Summit, March 20-21, in Sacramento, CA. Perimeter Solutions is a Gold Level Sponsor of the Summit.
The partnership intends to combine Voltree power's Bioenergy harvesting technology with its sensors that measure moisture and fuel levels in living and dead trees so Perimeter Solutions can offer products using the technology for fire safety ratings and prevention.
Voltree already offers the Javelin Lifetime sensing product that the company designed to be left in place over extended periods of time. It can be deployed in either a mesh sensor network configuration or single point deployment. Javelin Lifetime nodes get power from terrain-based energy harvesting technologies including Voltree Power's patented bioenergy harvesting module (see depiction of bioenergy harvesting technology-above left), which converts the metabolic energy of trees to usable electricity. Voltree says its Javelin Lifetime product is suitable for under-the-canopy-long-term monitoring applications.
In addition to bioenergy harvesting and moisture sensing, Voltree's technology has potential uses in homeland security, environmental and agricultural monitoring, meteorology and climate science, residential and commercial fire detection and prevention.
