"A wildfire burns in the hills of a Los Angeles suburb, leaping from one patch of dry brush to another as it approaches a cluster of homes. The landscaping at the first house burns, but the house itself stubbornly refuses to catch fire: any small flames that start along its walls or roof quickly die out. There's no water in sightthe flames are being quenched by sound waves. This kind of acoustic fire suppression may soon play a vital role in fighting wildfires."
"The key ingredients for a fire are heat, fuel and oxygen; take one of these away, and the flames are extinguished. Sound waves can stifle a fire by pushing oxygen molecules away from the fuel, preventing the fire from getting the air it needs to continue its combustion reaction. Geoff Bruder, an aerospace engineer who researched thermal energy conversion at NASA, co-founded Sonic Fire Tech to build a sound-generating machine for this purpose."
Acoustic waves can extinguish flames by pushing oxygen molecules away from fuel, starving the combustion reaction. Intense low-frequency sound vibrates oxygen faster than the fuel can use it, disrupting the chemical reaction that sustains fire. Sonic Fire Tech, co-founded by Geoff Bruder, has demonstrated acoustic fire suppression from roughly 25 feet. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency investigated the approach from 2008 to 2011, and academic teams followed, including a George Mason University team that built a subwoofer-like extinguisher in 2015. Acoustic influence on flames is established in combustion science; the main obstacle is scaling the technology for large wildfires and real-world deployment.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]