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How do fires occur in vehicles?
A fire can occur as soon as three basic factors are present: Combustible material, oxygen and a source of ignition.
All three conditions are present in an engine, which means that the risk of fire is present as soon as one of the three factors gets out of control, e.g. leaking oil, sparks from foreign objects or overheating.
The risk of engine fires is increasing nowadays due to demands for more compact, efficient and ever-greener engines. Buses are also subject to requirements for better accessibility for the elderly, which leads to decreased cooling effect under the buses when they are designed lower or are lowerable.
How to fight fires:
In practice, firefighting is done by removing one of the three elements that make up the fire triangle.
With an effective fire protection system, critical temperature increases are detected at a very early stage. This triggers an extinguishing agent that removes the oxygen supply to the fire, thus both effectively extinguishing the fire and preventing reignition by forming a sealing layer over the combustible material (e.g. engine oil).
