Another way to extinguish fire

                Recently, new way of extinguishing fire was invented; a recently-concluded DARPA program sought to extinguish fires using unusual methods; no water or simple common chemicals for DARPA; instead, this is “a novel flame-suppression system  based on destabilization of flame plasma with electromagnetic fields and acoustics techniques.”

                The name of this program is “Instant Fire Suppression”; it was undertaken by the DARPA research term at Harvard University. The Harvard University aims to find a way to put out fires that treats them in a fundamentally different way. It doesn’t use typical methods like water, or using a blanket, which are the chemical solutions that seek to starve the fire of oxygen or introduce a substance that destroys the fire source. However, this “Instant Fire Suppression” program is looking from a physics point of view instead of those chemical methods.

                “From a physics point of view,” says DARPA on their site, “flames are cold plasmas comprising mobile elections and slower positive ions.” So this project was designed to manipulate and extinguish fires using “physics techniques” like acoustics, ion injections, and manipulation of electromagnetic fields.  DARPA hasn’t said exactly how the fire killing rod in the video works, but the results of the project will hopefully be scaled up and used inside military vehicles, especially sensitive ones like ships that may not respond well to traditional firefighting methods.

                When you look at the video, this physical method seems not as efficient as the chemical methods like putting water or using a blanket; although It is just a small fire, it takes a time to extinguish it with injecting ion and manipulating electromagnetic fields; however, that is not the main point of this “Instant Fire Suppression” program. There two main benefits in this program.

                First, as it described in the site, this can be used in sensitive electric machines that people can’t use chemical way to extinguish. If military computer that contains important data is on fire, people can’t just put water on computer since computer will get destroyed; however, they can’t do other way for now to extinguish fire, so there is no way to save the data in that computer either way. Meanwhile if this physics way is more elevated and become more useful, people can easily extinguish the fire without damaging it. There are some places and times that people can’t use water or blanket to extinguish fire, so this new method is going to be useful.

                Second, since this is physics way, if this technology improves little bit more, those electric devices can be made out using this technology so it cannot be burnt. For instant, if this device is in military vehicles, it means that unless the device that injects ion and manipulates electromagnetic fields is destroyed, then basically that vehicle is immune to fire. Also, since there are some cases that people are getting hurt because their electric devices getting on fire and exploding, these cases will be eliminated due to the improvement of this “Instant Fire Suppression” program.

 

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-01/video-darpa-rubs-flame-wand-extinguish-it