Engineering students extinguish fire with sound
 

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ENGINEERING STUDENTS EXTINGUISH FIRE WITH SOUND

Post date:
28 Mar 2015 - 5:34pm


http://therealsingapore.com/sites/de...?itok=mqIK3udm





Imagine if all you needed to put out fire was a subwoofer. It's an idea that has been toyed with, theoretically, over the years -- DARPA demonstrated an acoustic extinguisher in 2012, following prior experiments from other researchers. Now, for the first time, a handheld extinguisher exists that uses not foam, powder or water, but the waves produced by a low-frequency sound.
The prototype extinguisher was developed by computer engineering major Viet Tran and electrical engineering major Seth Robertson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The pair hopes their design could revolutionise firefighting, particularly in the home.
The technology is based on the way sound waves displace oxygen as they move through physical space -- oxygen that fire feeds on. If you can suffocate a fire, you can extinguish it, so the pair set to work. They discovered that music is unsuitable -- the sound waves it produces are inconsistent.






A higher frequency sound caused the flames to vibrate, but that was all. The lower frequencies -- 30 to 60 hertz -- seemed to be the so-called "Goldilocks zone" at which the waves were able to effectively keep the oxygen from the flames long enough to suffocate them.
See the video here: https://youtu.be/uPVQMZ4ikvM
*Read the rest of the article at http://www.cnet.com/news/engineering...re-with-sound/


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