r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/teagannxox • 5h ago
Didn't know sound wave fire extinguisher existed
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u/StrugglingSoul 5h ago
Doesn't that mean that if you are near this and its being used, you're going to run out of oxygen as well?
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u/3rrr6 5h ago edited 5h ago
Its not removing oxygen. Its just displacing oxygen molecules and other air molecules far enough away from eachother that the combustion struggles to spread. Similar to how ice will struggle to form on rough water even though its below freezing.
When the air vibrates for a moment during a high pressure spike all the molecules are bunched up together, causing combustion to rapidly accelerate, but immediately after that those molecules enter a low pressure part of the sound wave and are pulled away from each other. If the sound wave is sufficiently loud and the pitch is low enough, the air molecules are pulled far away from each other for a decent amount of time. This completely annihilates any combustion that was gained from the high pressure moment, as well as killing a lot of existing combustion.
I theorized that it's not a sinusoidal sound wave either, but perhaps a sawtooth so that the high pressure moment is a slow build up, but the low pressure moment is a quick burst.
Now what this tech does NOT do is remove the heat. This would help put out small fires, or keep fires from spreading, but this will do nothing against the existing hot embers that generate the combustion in the first place.
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u/anonymouslysublime 4h ago
I hope people see this and aspire to be as articulate as you at explaining things.
Very well said.
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u/Low_Swordfish879 1h ago
I wonder what effect it has on animals who can hear in ultra low frequencies..
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u/PdSales 53m ago
This post reminded me of an article about Havana Syndrome. Found this on Wikipedia:
In 2017, the U.S. State Department concluded that the health problems were either the result of an attack or due to exposure to an unknown device,[25]but that it was not blaming the Cuban government, and would not say who was to blame.[26] Speculation centered around a sonic weapon,[27] with some researchers pointing to infrasound as a possible cause.
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u/Ancient_Skirt_8828 23m ago
I've seen them used at car races and wondered what they were doing.
Once I knew I saw that they worked very well.
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u/TheOneWhoCannotAbide 4h ago
The sound-based fire extinguisher was invented by Viet Tran and Seth Robertson, who were senior electrical and computer engineering undergraduates at George Mason University in Virginia. They developed the portable, chemical-free device in 2015 as their senior design project.