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Explosion Protection Inside a Fuel Tank
 Fuel tanks contain large amounts of highly
flammable content and are therefore prone to fire and explosion. We recently developed a technology called FuelShield to protect the fuel tanks against ullage explosions and hydrodynamic ram. This
concept draws on a proprietary technology developed at BlazeTech to generate high quality fuel foam with expansion ratios > 20. At these volume expansion ratios, the ullage
can be protected even if very small amount of fuel is left in the fuel tank. In the presence of an ignition source, the liquid fuel from the
fuel foam cells surrounding the ignition source vaporize creating local fuel vapor over-rich zones that suppress the ignition.
The foam can be generated using the existing plumbing in fuel systems with very minor modifications. This technology imposes much lower cost, weight, and space penalties compared to
existing inerting technologies. Other ullage protection technologies use either a solid or liquid foreign
material to fill the ullage (severe space penalties) or nitrogen (weight and logistics penalties) to shift the ullage composition into non-flammable regime. Our invention uses fuel foam to shift the
fuel/oxygen ratios outside the flammable range locally around the ignition source by making it fuel over-rich.
This technology can be implemented in aircraft, race cars and speed boats.
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