Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds

bentt

very cool! Can we get a link to a not terrible website with real information?

ssl-3

> Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had. ...meanwhile, some folks at George Mason University were doing this back in 2015[1]: > The fire extinguisher uses low-frequency sound waves to douse a blaze. Engineering seniors Viet Tran and Seth Robertson now hold a preliminary patent application for their potentially revolutionizing device. []: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10569115B2/en [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPVQMZ4ikvM

frickinLasers

I wonder if she got the idea from https://www.sonicfiretech.com/

cactusplant7374

> Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had. Hate to be a downer, but this has been done before. https://acoustics.org/pressroom/httpdocs/150th/Plaks.html

cwillu

Pangram reports 100% AI; it may be an artifact of translation, but...

nilslindemann

Well, a search for "youtube acoustic fire extinguisher" indicates it has already been invented a few times by people all over the world. The most interesting video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvnCQg4w4o8

mulanroo

The reason this keeps getting reinvented is that the physics only half works. Sound disrupts the flame's boundary layer and separates it from the fuel, but it removes almost no heat. The fuel stays above its ignition temperature, so anything hot nearby relights it the second the speaker stops. DARPA demoed this in 2012 and it stalled there. Impressive on a small liquid fuel fire in a lab, very hard to scale to anything you'd actually want to put out.

bawolff

out of curiosity, would something like this hurt a human? I assume the sound waves must be pretty powerful to put out a fire.

kevin_nisbet

Not exactly acoustic but reminds me of a high school science project we had one year, something along the lines of put out a candle with a contraption. My partner and I rigged up a balloon to be popped by the candle, and the balloon pop blows out the candle. Probably not an original idea, but I don't think any other group in the class tried a similar approach. Worked like a charm.

Animats

This seems to be a known technology but hasn't made it as a product.[1] It might have potential for very specific types of extinguishing, such as grills and grain silos, where the distance from extinguisher to trouble spot is fixed. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/8/4/129

spottedmarley

Oooh.. from the title I thought this was about an extinguisher for when your guitar catches fire. Makes more sense now

rootedbox

At other frequencies, sound can actually intensify flames, depending on the surrounding environment. Standing waves and the frequency of the sound (FM) are likely factors in this phenomenon. However, it’s not advisable to use sound as a method for extinguishing fires.

copper-float

Why does it matter that she's Mexican?

MathMonkeyMan

When an oil well goes off, high explosives can be used to extinguish it. Maybe this is the same principle.

CR1337

..has been around for a long time. DARPA worked on it 10+ years ago.

Sabinus

I struggle to understand why this article is interesting or upvoted.

dfee

when i was in the 5th grade (give or take a couple years), there was an innovation project where we were to bring in and present to the class an invention. i remember a girl inventing what i now know to be a "flexible weighted dip tube" – think of it as a shampoo bottle that you can pump upside down – and was amazed. like this submission, the flexible straw wasn't really invented by the student. at best it was independently discovered, but this patent was from at least twenty five years before: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3547296A/en to that end, i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are – especially in the time of the internet when prior art is so easily discovered. or, did i miss the point?

diogenescynic

This is something from science fiction or a comic book. Super cool!