DARPA Creates Fire Extinguisher Made of Sound

DARPA Creates Fire Extinguisher Made of Sound

www.isciencetimes.com

(DARPA) - the innovations arm of the U.S. Department of Defense - has pioneered a new way to extinguish flames using sound.

... From a physics perspective, flames are cold plasmas. DARPA theorized that by using physics techniques rather than combustion chemistry, it might be possible to manipulate and extinguish flames, reports IT World. They successfully use a sound wall blasting at a specific frequency to put out a fire by placing speakers on either side of the fuel

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Related News Links:
www.wired.com
www.darpa.mil

Using physics techniques rather than combustion theory has achieved a
breakthrough not seen in 50 years of research.

Electromagnetics and acoustics waves interaction
with the plasma in a flame to extinguish fires,
how cool is that?

The team arranged two speakers either
side of a liquid fuel flame to demonstrate how
fire can be controlled by amping up an acoustic field.
The sound increases air velocity, which then thins the
area of the flame where combustion occurs, known as
the flame boundary. Once the boundary area is thinned, the
flame is easier to extinguish. At the same time, the acoustics are
disturbing the pool of fuel and creating
higher fuel vaporisation — this widens the flame,
thinning it out so it is less concentrated and cool
enough to extinguish.

Even better, the sound does not even need to be offensively loud to achieve any of this.

“We have shown that the physics of combustion still has surprises in store for us,”
www.wired.com...

www.youtube.com...

Of course, there is the flip side; the data accumulated
can be used to increase the efficiency of combustion.

Either way breaking the 50 year mark is exciting!

www.isciencetimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Finally, something I see as a real scientific breakthrough. We haven't had any of those in a long time. Hopefully this will change some scientific paradigms, and start a ripple effect of creativity and discovery in the stagnant scientific community.

reply to post by burntheships


Oh, the downside...... How much you want to bet the murderers, I mean military use this as a means of upping the destruction of war. Damn humans.

That's awesomely cool. The possibilities are endless, military as well as civilian. Just imagine a building burning, and the Fire Department arriving and extinguishing it by blasting out the Department chief's choice of suitable music on maximum volume.

Originally posted by TKDRL
Hopefully this will change some scientific paradigms, and start a ripple effect of creativity
and discovery in the stagnant scientific community.

Yes, 50 years of stagnation in this area...thats a long time.

I am hoping as a flip side maybe they can increase fuel efficiency in engines,
now that be something to look for! I am sure it will take them some time to
work out the details, but it sure would be awesome!

reply to post by burntheships


See, that is the kind of thinking we need. Also the kind of thinking that the oil companies would buy up, steal and outright murder for as well. Damn Humans. Lol, damn humans should be my new signature I think

reply to post by burntheships


Just what I was thinking-this would be great if it could give us all more MPG,but hey you know the oil companies will try to supress that from happening..
Shame.

Originally posted by Gauss
That's awesomely cool.

Yes, it really is cool. In a way cool science way.
Using cold plasma to put out flames...way to go DARPA!

If man wants to use technology for good,its there and available for us!

WIN !!! for sound and vibration.

now do this experiment in a gold crowned pyramid.

Originally posted by Silcone Synapse
but hey you know the oil companies will try to supress that from happening..

Well, maybe you never know there might come a time.
We do have cell phones, laptops and wireless ...

So its coming, its just a matter of when.
Lets hope its not another 50 years!

So that's why it feels so good to play my guitar. So that's why Bob Marley said, "When music hits, you feel no pain."

Originally posted by burntheships
So its coming, its just a matter of when.
Lets hope its not another 50 years!

Too right-I am already thinking this could be easy enough to reproduce with the correct audio equipment and some ingenious way of harnessing some of that wasted EM energy from car HT leads...

This may be something we could do in our own garage/local mechanics if we could learn the correct frequency for making more efficient combustion.

This is a great step forward.Could the same tech be tuned to make other types of reactions "slow down"I wonder?
You can slow a flame down with this-So could you also slow down the frequency of the human metabolism?

Could this tech one day give us a means to put people in stasis for interstellar travel?

reply to post by DarkKnight21


I think your onto something there.


The more I ponder this, its hard to think it took this long
for them do accomplish this.

Originally posted by Silcone Synapse

This is a great step forward.Could the same tech be tuned to make other types of reactions "slow down"I wonder?

I think they mentioned that too in one of the write ups...

Yes, here it is:

Being able to bend flames might seem like a very cool but ultimately useless method of firefighting, however the system will come in handy when fires rage out of control in enclosed spaces — the flames can be redirected to provide safe passage, if they cannot be extinguished completely. The method also prevents the fire spreading, and thus renders it localised and easier to control.www.wired.com...

I think it's very cool! You could easily mount speakers in all kinds of places where a fire may happen without destroying a whole business the way some systems now do........as long as this was the point of the work.

DARPA isn't a firefighting research center though.... If this was a spin off from another project, I think I'm going to be sick. Depends on the nature of what developed this.

Originally posted by burntheships

Originally posted by Gauss
That's awesomely cool.

Yes, it really is cool. In a way cool science way.
Using cold plasma to put out flames...way to go DARPA!

If man wants to use technology for good,its there and available for us!

*confused
I think they are referring to the flames as a 'cold plasma', not their technique to quench them. It's using sound waves to put out the cold plasma (flames).



Actually, thinking on how this works, it must be creating a tight standing wave that is preventing oxygen from getting across it... Flames run out of oxygen, out they go....

I hope they don't install this at some stadium.... Suffocation on a mass scale! (Obviously this would need to be scaled up gazillions of times..)

Originally posted by Qumulys
it must be creating a tight standing wave that is preventing oxygen from getting across it... Flames run out of oxygen, out they go....

Ionic Wind puts out the flames....

reply to post by burntheships


That is using the electrode method to disrupt the flames, not the speaker/sound extinguisher which is what I thought this thread was titled about?

Originally posted by TKDRL
reply to post by burntheships

 

Oh, the downside...... How much you want to bet the murderers, I mean military use this as a means of upping the destruction of war. Damn humans.

They follow orders in the same round about way that you do when your boss tells you to make his cup of coffee.

I would have agreed with you untill you threw our troops in the mix so blindly. I'm X-Army. Guess that makes me a murderer too...