Extinguishing dust and inefficiency
An engineering firm designs a new process line to improve an extinguisher-refilling operation, making it less dusty and more efficient.
The Brayton Fire Training Field, located in College Station, Tex., is operated by the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX), a member of the Texas A&M University System. The 120-acre training facility is the largest in the US with 132 training stations and 21 live-fire training stations, which include full-scale buildings, towers, tanks, industrial plant structures, and a ship that are all used for various fire and rescue training classes. Each year, more than 50,000 firefighters and emergency workers from the US and other countries travel to the Brayton facility for realistic, hands-on training. For some of the training exercises, the trainees use portable hand-held fire extinguishers that are later refilled with powder and reused in future training exercises. Since the facilitys operators refill more than 12,000 extinguishers a year, TEEX recently decided to upgrade the extinguisher-refilling operation to make it more operator-friendly. TEEX worked with a Houston-based engineering firm to spec equipment and design the new extinguisher-refilling operation.