Born from the cost of unwanted alarms and the habit of ignoring them, Micropack has spent thirty years making flame detectors harder to fool. Managing director Graham Duncan tells us how.
On a video call, Graham gestures towards the window.
“The test ground is right there,” he says in a warm, quick Scottish accent. “That helps us build great products because we can actually have fun and test fires in real life.”
The test ground Graham pointed to is in Portlethen, just south of Aberdeen, one of very few facilities in Scotland licensed for live-fire testing.
Micropack’s headquarters does not look especially pyromaniac. The pale two-storey building, with its broad tiled roof and neat rows of black-framed windows, looks more like an oversized family home than a high-tech safety company.
The address is more revealing: Fire Training Centre, Schoolhill. Beyond the green fence are fire engines, shipping containers and structures used for fire and offshore emergency training.
Sorting flame from noise
Micropack’s origins, however, are tied to fires that never actually happened. “Back in the early 90s, it was all about unwanted alarms,” Graham says.
In the oil and gas industry, flame detection was mainly based on infrared or ultraviolet sensors, which worked well but could trigger unwanted alarms from welding, sunlight, exhaust fumes, or industrial heat radiation.
Such unwanted alarms can cause shutdowns. When production stops, crews must respond, and too many alarms can make people stop trusting the systems.
“It’s like the boy who cried wolf,” Graham says. “You get enough of them, and then you start to ignore them.”
Micropack was already working with cameras and began asking whether they could distinguish a real flame from things that fooled conventional detectors.
“That was in 1996. Yeah, ’96,” Graham repeats. ” So they were black-and-white cameras, quite literally.”
He says they were writing what would now be regarded as modern AI: intelligent algorithms to detect fire using cameras. Today, the idea is familiar. Cars recognise road signs and phones recognise faces.
Finding the right spots
Then came the question of where to place the detectors: so-called fire and gas mapping. In a building, most of this can be figured out using standard rules and guidelines.
“But on a platform in the North Sea with strong wind, rain, and tough conditions, you need a method to map coverage and ensure the right detectors are in the right spots.”
Graham traces Micropack’s mapping work back to the late 1980s, before it became Micropack Engineering Limited in 1996.
The camera technology soon underwent its first major offshore test. A floating production storage and offloading facility used by BP west of Shetland had experienced repeated unwanted alarms and shutdowns. Micropack installed its visual flame detectors as a beta system.
“We tested and refined it. We made it better.”
Unwanted alarms decreased significantly. BP then implemented the technology on other key assets.
“That was, I suppose, the moment that the penny dropped.”
The dad lore
Ten years later, in 2006, Graham joined Micropack. He studied electronic engineering and completed a modern apprenticeship at NCR, a major cash-machine maker in his hometown.
ATMs had their uses but never sparked Graham’s imagination. He craved the grit of heavy engineering, the challenge of safety systems, and a career that would take him out into the world.
“The lure of global travel,” he says. “Obscure, exciting, weird, wonderful places.”
Micropack delivered on that part. There was commissioning work in the Sahara Desert, offshore jobs in Angola and, on one assignment, abseiling down the side of an oil rig.
His children have their own category for these stories.
“Dad lore,” he laughs. “My kids think I sit on Teams calls all day. Well, I do. But I tell them Dad went to some pretty cool places and did good stuff.”
Small team, big impact
When he became Managing Director, he describes it as being handed “the keys to the castle.” Today, Micropack’s core team consists of 18 people.
“I think we forget that,” Graham says. “For 18 people, we punch well above our weight.”
The weight is worth spelling out. Micropack’s detectors monitor pipelines and LNG terminals, as well as food and packaging factories, paper mills, power plants, trains and ferries.
“Anywhere the risk to people, property, and planet is great is the benchmark we look for in applications,” Graham says.
Aircraft hangars qualify, military and commercial alike. In hardened shelters where an air force must respond fast and a jet leaves hot fumes, a detector must ignore the jet itself while still protecting the hangar. An unwanted alarm could dump foam over an aircraft.
“It could be 30, 40, or 50 million dollars in damage.”
He mentions SpaceX and Tesla, where Micropack detectors are installed. At Tesla, they protect battery energy-storage facilities, the Megapacks.
That one makes him smile. “I love the name. No link, but yeah, a Micropack and a Megapack.”
The engineering work goes beyond product development. Micropack today focuses on fire and gas mapping consultancy, advising energy companies worldwide on how many flame and gas detectors their facilities need and where to place them to help keep people and assets safe.
The company also offers advice on fluid dynamics modelling, fire protection design and safety assessments.
What the acquisition brought
Micropack’s solutions gained international reach, with Graham among those introducing it globally.
Around 2014 or 2015, Graham travelled to Gothenburg Sweden to demonstrate Micropack’s products at Consilium Safety Group’s headquarters. In April 2016, Consilium acquired a majority stake in Micropack.
Consilium brought career growth, a network of market companies to scale through, and serious investment behind the business.
“It was a huge opportunity,” he says. “Coming from a company of 18 people to having colleagues around the world, and offices where our products would be championed.”
“We have developed our people in a way I don’t think a standalone business of our size could,” he adds.
The impact also shows in the numbers. For years, Graham says, Micropack produced around 2,000 to 2,500 flame detectors annually. Production now exceeds 12,000 units yearly.
“From a production volume perspective, we are now in the Premier League.”
Graham points to recent hires with PhDs in machine vision. These experts have skills needed in many fields beyond fire detection.
“In AI and machine vision, they could go anywhere,” he says. “But because of what we do at Micropack and Consilium on a wider scale, they chose to join us.”
Testing limits
When asked about the future of detection, Graham talks about systems combining data from flame detectors, gas detectors, and other sensors to give operators a clearer picture of what is happening.
He also sees potential for a system to warn an operator before a detector develops a fault.
Not every fire is the same, though. Graham points out that there are invisible fires, as well as metal fires, jet fires, and pool fires.
“So you need a balance of technologies. There’s no such thing as a perfect flame detector. It’s understanding the application and then applying the correct technology to it.”
Graham says competitors have rested on their laurels using technology from twenty years ago, infrared or ultraviolet, while Micropack has moved into those technologies as well as smart-camera detection. Micropack now has the widest portfolio of any flame-detection manufacturer worldwide.
He points to the FDS303, Micropack’s conventional triple-infrared detector, to show how far its engineers can push the technology. They achieved a detection distance of 160 metres last year. The closest competing product has a certified detection distance of 80 to 90 metres.
A longer detection range can reduce the number of detectors a facility needs and lower the customer’s investment.
Even so, some engineers would ask why anyone need that range. Graham’s answer was a fast car.
“If you build one of the fastest cars in the world, you want to know its top speed even if no one drives it at full speed”, he says and adds:
“We as engineers should constantly challenge ourselves to find the actual limits of our products.”
He gives another example. SpaceX sometimes blows up rockets while testing them.
“You think, my goodness, why do they do that? It’s because they want to find out how these things work. We do the same for our safety devices because you want something you can trust to work.”
Video down the wire
That same philosophy shapes Micropack’s next flagship visual detector, the FDS301 HD.
“The name is not that imaginative,” Graham smiles. “We just added HD to the end.”
The upgrade, however, is more consequential than the name suggests. The FDS301 HD can send live high-definition video through the power cables already running across plants and offshore platforms.
For operators, it removes the huge cost and hassle of installing miles of new cables while instantly putting eyes in the control room the moment an alarm goes off. He also sees it working with SensEye and connecting to SMiG and AI programs developed at Consilium.
Ten years from now, Micropack turns forty. Asked what he hopes to look back on, Graham says it is a bit of a mix. The market position as leader in safety technology is a given. Then there is the other side.
“I would like to see people in our organisation achieving their full potential, whether that is by becoming the best leaders or the best engineers or the best researchers or developers.”
“That’s really fun for me.”
