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FireDrone coated with aluminium to scope out burning buildings and wildfires

FireDrone coated with aluminium to scope out burning buildings and wildfires

FireDrone, a prototype drone developed jointly by researchers from the Imperial College London and Empa. The drones are strong enough to survive extreme temperatures and infiltrate burning structures. To reflect heat, they coated it with super-reflective aluminium. After exposure to high temperatures, the super-insulation stops the materials from shrinking and the pore architectures from deteriorating.
They constructed a protective structural casing for the drone out of lightweight, thermally super-insulating materials, including polyimide aerogel and glass fibres. The drone comprises a unique thermal aerogel insulating material and a cooling system that allows it to survive temperatures of up to 200°C for 10 minutes. The researchers think FireDrone, still in the prototype stage, might be used to scope out flames for humans and added risks to reinforce firefighting.
“The application of drones is often limited by environmental factors like temperature. We demonstrate a way to overcome this and are convinced our findings will help to unleash the future power of drones for extreme environments. Deploying robots in extreme environments provides great benefits to reducing risks to human lives, and who better to look to than animals that have evolved their own ways of adapting to these extremes using inspirating from how animals keep cool in heat,” said Principal Investigator Professor Mirko Kovac.