Design and Development of a Smart Fire Alarm System for Early Fire Detection and Loss Reduction
In this paper, a stand-alone, low-cost fire alarm system, a feature-less, basic instrument for early flame detection in small indoor environments, based only on an infrared flame sensor, is designed, implemented, and experimentally evaluated. The design is based on Arduino Uno microcontroller, that is responsible for instantaneously tracking the output of flame sensor for immediate local fire alarm through a buzzer, LED for high-intensity warning and status-indicator LED. An LCD display is provided to show real-time system messages, including standby conditions, flame detection alerts, etc.
It employs the Arduino Uno’s small footprint microcontroller to conduct a low-power mode of high-throughput infrared flame detection, to create a short, effective fire alarm system at low energy demand. While many present day fire-alarm systems rely on smoke or gas sensors, network interfacing, or mechanical ventilation elements in order to work, this design is fully off the grid and does not depend on any internet, IoT modules, exhaust fans, or smoke sensors. The system architecture specifically maintains small, rugged, and cost effective architecture to be suitable for low resource settings, educational research facilities as well as small residential rooms. In a miniaturized indoor experimental setup to examine the prototype’s response accuracy, detection reliability, and false alarms response under different conditions, a series of controlled trials were performed. The system is shown to detect open flames quickly and be stationary in the presence of non-flame stimuli as steam, dust, and changes in ambient lighting or heat source (without combustion) which leads to an extremely low false-alarm rate. The paper discusses some design issues concerning sensor placement and threshold tuning and discusses the suitability of flame-based offline detection in settings where traditional smoke detectors or IoT-enabled platforms are impractical. Recommendations for future improvements are also provided, such as multi-sensor integration and optional wireless notification for more advanced deployments.
Keywords: flame sensor; Arduino Uno; stand-alone fire detection; low-cost embedded system; offline alarm device; early flame recognition.
