Our Solution

R-Fire is a company founded by firefighters and pilots who have used their corresponding experience to create a novel solution to fight forest fires. They have joined forces with TFEX Engineering Ltd and together developed the I4F technology and validated it with our prototype to tackle forest fire by using foam. TFEX has broad range of firefighting products and also own the Instant Foam technology.

Water has limited cooling capacity and a lot of water goes to waste during refilling the buckets and also during the transportation from the water resource to the fire front. Dropping water also causes problems: pilots can miss the target, distribution on surface is not homogeneous, and much of it is below or above the effectively threshold where the water is useless. There are some technical initiatives to raise the efficiency of the use of pure water for forest fires. Airplanes and some helicopters use inside tanks to reduce the waste of refilling and transportation. Short and long term retardants are also used. The long term retardants are extremely expensive but undoubtedly efficient. Foam as short term retardant also increase the efficiency of the water that is much cheaper than retardants but its efficiency and duration is below the long term retardant. Instant Foam for Fighting Forest Fire (I4F) technology creates homogeneous foam, ensures long lasting and it reduces the waste compared to water or traditional foam.

The main novelty of our solution is using our foam based extinguishing material for aerial application and the fast refilling of this material. Additional innovation is that the I4F products can be applied to different types of aerial vehicles and the use of lightweight composite materials for the vessels. Furthermore, the foam used in I4F is more environmental friendly than the long term retardants that mixed with water at present. The main reason for this is, that the foaming agent needed for our application is in a very small ratio to reach a much more efficient effect.