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. perhaps it was independently discovered as an idea, 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 plot?
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
I sure hope humans are in the loop at those companies, reviewing pics that aren't recognized as faces. If I ever see one of those captchas, they'll get to see some things that no human has ever, or should ever, see.
Love when something decides I'm a bot and the decision is final. (Looking at you, CPU-World -- it even lets me know my IP address has been banned for "abuse", too.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Stereotyped as less of a STEM country, probably accurately, so it seems newsworthy plus gives people hope and optimism to hear about cool inventions from there.
“The average IQ in the United States is typically standardized around 100, while unofficial global internet datasets estimate Mexico's average IQ between 86 and 90”
There's plenty of links in Dublin comments for other instances of the tech being developed at least partially, and at least one for in-home fire suppression. Given that last one, I'm thinking it operates on the basis of resonance rather than amplitude to disrupt combustion.
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.
I wonder if one could use a thermal camera (or some other, high speed sensor) and some kind of feedback loop to squelch it and keep it disrupted until it cools. Or conversely, manipulate the flame for more complete combustion (in industrial processes).
But granted, I have trouble seeing this work on a large scale without much more sophisticated sonic wave tech.
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. perhaps it was independently discovered as an idea, 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 plot?
> Verify you are human
Does anyone else command + w on first sight of a cloudflare screen?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/googles-camera-ba...
[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/8/4/129
...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
That said, it's a solid student project. I'm sure she'll do well at university.
[1]: https://www.ifsecglobal.com/uncategorized/soundwaves-a-new-p...
[2]: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
Depending on what they have going, it might be loud, might not.
DARPA worked on it 10+ years ago.
Hate to be a downer, but this has been done before.
https://acoustics.org/pressroom/httpdocs/150th/Plaks.html
But granted, I have trouble seeing this work on a large scale without much more sophisticated sonic wave tech.