CNN - Firefighters may be snuffing blazes with deep-toned sound, if a new device invented by two engineering students in Fairfax, Virginia, catches on.
Viet Tran and Seth Robertson's new fire extinguisher looks a little like a conventional one, but instead of a compressed air tank spewing out chemicals, theirs has a loudspeaker the size of subwoofer drumming out sound waves.
It's not much to listen to, just a low hum, but when pointed at flames, it makes them vanish.
In a way, it's like blowing the fire out, because sound waves are basically multiple, regular blasts of air.
When they started out, Tran and Robertson thought high-pitched tones would do the trick. It didn't work.
"It's low-frequency sounds – like the thump-thump bass in hip-hop that works," Tran said.
Tran envisions the new extinguishers starting out small, perhaps mounted over stovetops to put out grease fires. Or astronauts could deploy them."In space, extinguisher contents spread all over. But you can direct sound waves without gravity," Robertson said.
Robertson and Tran appear to have beaten a defense agency to the punch, according to George Mason University, where the two developed the extinguisher as a sort of senior year final exam.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has run experiments on blasting out fire with sound but don't appear to have developed something as handy as an extinguisher.
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2 comments:
Excellent characterization of DARPA. Accurate!
I was in the fire protection sprinkler industry until I retired in 2006. There was talk about this technology from the National Association of Fire Marshals and the NFPA as far back as the late 90s. I was in numerous discussions with local authorities in Georgia concerning this very thing. If I remember correctly, similar tests had already been conducted at the University of Georgia. But my memory is not what it once was. ;-)
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