ULRICA Fiber-Optic Distributed Heat Detection System
ULRICA is a heat detector system based on fiber optic technology. The system consists of three components, fiber optic sensor cable, monitor unit – OMU and relay card.
The sensor cable consists of an optical fiber strapped to a temperature sensitive body. This forms a continuous line heat detector sensing temperature and indicating alarm at a defined temperature. Heat detection is provided continuously along the length of the sensor cable. The design is completely dielectric and therefore not affected by electromagnetic radiation or electrical discharge.
The monitor unit covers 2000 m of sensor cable. Common practice is to configure the monitored area into alarm zones. The system allows supervision of up to 256 zones. Each zone can be configured as a continuous length of cable or a combined arbitrary number cable sections. Minimum length of a zone is two meters. Maximum zone length is equivalent to the entire length of cable.
The system is able to detect several hot-spots along the sensor cable and separate them in different zones as well as pinpoint the position of each hot spot. Indication of alarm to a surveillance system is made by traditional relay logic. Relays may be selected normally open or normally closed available on the front connectors. There is also a separate general alarm output (any zone), normally open, on PIN 6 and PIN 9 of the RS-485 connector. The Ethernet port it used by the “OMU config tool” when configuring the system. The Ethernet interface may also be used by a surveillance system to monitor the system status thus replacing the relay logic. Internal system errors generated by fiber break or other hardware or software faults will put the unit in an error state and indicate system error through the Health relay.