Hola Folks!
Along the lines of Keely, I love this one...reminds me of using negative
ions to displace oxygen and quench fire;
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/515312/
10/17/05 - Extinguishing fires with sound
Conventional fire extinguishers do not work properly aboard spacecraft,
because the extinguisher's foam tends to spread out in a low-g
environment rather than smother a fire. Therefore, students from the
University of West Georgia are testing to see if sound waves can
extinguish a flame in a low-gravity environment. In the meantime, the
Prometheus Project, which contains graduate-student and faculty
advisors, has obtained an encouraging sign: sound can repeatedly
extinguish small flames in the 1-g environment of their lab.
This finding might lead to applications of its own, such as putting out
fires in computer-server rooms where water damage from conventional fire
extinguishers can be costly.
Using sound to extinguish flames is new and has not been previously
reported in the literature, according to Plaks. While the researchers
know that sound can cause pressure to drop at the site of a flame, they
are working to determine the explicit mechanism, which might involve a
temperature decline at the site of the flame or a decrease in the
concentration of oxygen.
--
Jerry Decker - http://www.keelynet.com
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Order out of Chaos - From an Art to a Science
