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Fighting Fires With Beams of Electricity
cylonlover writes "It's certainly an established fact that electricity can cause fires, but a group of Harvard scientists have presented their research on the use of electricity for fighting fires. In a presentation at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, Dr. Ludovico Cademartiri told of how they used a unique device to shoot beams of electricity at an open flame over one foot tall. Almost immediately, he said, the flame was extinguished. 'Such a device could be used, for instance, to make a path for firefighters to enter a fire or create an escape path for people to exit, he said. The system shows particular promise for fighting fires in enclosed quarters, such as armored trucks, planes, and submarines.'"
Not another obvious joke, the fire department of course! Now with laser beams that are not attached to sharks!
So your submarine is on fire, burning up your oxygen, underwater, while you're, say, launching nuclear missiles and being pursued by enemy subs, and your solution is to electrify it?
Awesome. All your base...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
... about this "Ludovico technique." It didn't end well.
Please oh please.
Like streams of electrons or ions?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Anyone have any idea how this thing actually works?
The best I could come up with is based on a very small part of the article:
So I guess what happens is that the electrical field charges the soot and other light carbony things generated in the fire, which causes them to disperse sort of like what happens with this toy? How does that help extinguish the fire, though? Wouldn't the outward motion of the carbon particulates just bring in more oxygen?
What other effects are going on?
Water dripping off you, down your neck, sliding around in foam and soaked to the skin kind of wet. You could pee your pants and know one would even know, except for the funny coffee smell, kind of wet. The fist thing that happens is utilities disconnect the gas and power meter before anyone enters the structure (power and water don't mix). Never mind the Scott packs. Now water around your feet and a battery strapped to your back where do you put your Scott pack? Also your gear already weighs about 60 pounds with Scot pack. This is stupid we already have a grenade like device that will snuff out a fully engulfed house for 12 minutes the only side effect is a fine white powder on everything.
If there's a story that is crying out for some audio-visual documentation, this had got to be it!
I mean electricity and fire (and maybe they use a laser to create an ionized channel for the electricity to go through).
If they can put out a magnesium fire with this device then I will be impressed. I would also like to see it tested in a room full of hydrogen/oxygen mix.
All they had to do was reverse the polarity!
It's so simple!
Ice Cream has no bones.
Who cares about putting out the fire... I just want the Lightning Cannon.
Evil Overlord Notice #1 : Discontinue Operation : Weaponize Shark immediately.
Evil Overlord Notice #2 : The Commissary of Evil will be serving fish sticks all week.
"Shooting beams of electricity" sounds like Ghostbusters, not real world physics.
I hear if you do something like that they give you this cool award named after that evolution dude. Go for it man!
Monstar L
This would be a fun way of extinguishing the candles on your birthday cake...
Might even work with those "prankster" candles that relight ... :)
I know that calcium was instrumental in the development of imcimal baratilam.
I'm not feeling very competent, but:
a) Soot particles aggregate, lowering their surface-to-volume ratio, shutting down the combustion, or
b) Soot particles escape the plasma, shutting down combustion, or
c) Electron flow from the gun interferes with the combustion reaction itself, which would be awesome
Cool!
And what the hell are beams of electricity?
Come on! Fire, water, and now beams of electricity! What could happen!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The police and fireman can share a tool, a tazer doubles as a fire extinguisher!
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
Danilo Odell: Yeah, what the hell was that thing?
Lieutenant Worf: Automated fire system. A force field contains the flame until the remaining oxygen has been consumed.
Danilo Odell: Ah, yeah, w-what if I had been under that thing?
Lieutenant Worf: You would have been standing in the fire.
Danilo Odell: Yeah, well, leaving that aside for the moment, I mean, what would have happened to me?
Lieutenant Worf: You would have suffocated and died.
Danilo Odell: Ye-ah, sweet mercy.
Flames are ionised (i.e. charged) particles. If you have a strong enough electric field (which is really not the same as 'shooting electricity' as per the article) when the charged particles move through the electric field there will be a force on them perpendicular to their motion and to the field i.e. the flame will curve over into spiral.
If you could get this to happen on a large enough scale, the flame would suppress itself as instead of the flame moving away from the fuel it would hang around - stopping oxygen from reaching the fuel.
If this all sounds really unlikely, that's because it is. Here it a video showing an electric field affecting a small candle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fKGeV4NrrA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
It looks like you need an electric field on the order of 10keV per 5cm to get this effect. So if you wanted to do it on a fire that was say 5 meters across you'd need an electric field in the order of 1MV which while obtainable is not exactly an easy thing to setup - particularly when there's a fire going on.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
No wait! DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS!!!!! Give me a break. "Beams of electricity"? Could have been described in a more Slashdot-friendly way. Maybe "Bolts of Karma".
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
the next thing is that the brilliant doctor would be kidnapped by the evil Fu-Ling, who would use the invention to down airplanes by inhibiting their internal combustion engines. Fortunately the hero's plane is atomic powered.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This must occur more often than I realize.
but it's called WINNING.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I think it's an oscillating field, so reversing the polarity already happens.
Now, if they'd only re-routed power through the deflector dish...
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Surely such powers cannot be trusted in the hands of muggles, esp. war mongering ones who will turn anything and everything into military research.
While you used Einstein as the 'icon' for this article, Tesla would have been more on target here.
On the face of it, I can't imagine that firemen would be really pleased at this.
Let's see we have fire, smoke, water, (and in the examples they gave) all-metal vehicles. Let's toss in some high-voltage electricity?
-Styopa
We really do live in the frickin' future .
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Sir,
You have electric and magnetic fields confused with each other. If you have a MAGNETIC FIELD, when charged particles move across (NOT along) it, there is a force on them perpendicular to their motion (and to the field, incidentally).
In an electric field, the force on the charged particle depends on the orientation of the electric field, not on the orientation of the charged particle's momentum.
I refer you to the Lorentz equation, which goes like this:
F = q (E + V cross B)
where capital letters denote vector quantities and "cross" is the cross-product operator. As you can see, the force from the electric field (q times E) is parallel to E. The force from the magnetic field (q V cross B) is perpendicular to both the magnetic field and the particle's velocity.
I'm not sure whether the rest of your explanation holds water--when you have a rapidly changing electric field it is accompanied by a magnetic field, which WILL curve particles like you say. In fact, when you have both, you have what is called an "E cross B" drift, in which charged particles have a motion perpendicular to both the E and the B field. (Is that what you meant?)
And yes, IAAP.
--PeterM
It strikes me that this could be one of the FEW inventions that are actually worthy of a patent.
Also, I wonder how scalable this technology is. The explicitly say in the article that this wouldn't work well for a forest fire: why not?
Another thing I wonder is this: if you put out a fire with water, you cool down the stuff that's burning as well as removing oxygen. If your new flame suppressor is applied to a hot pile of, say, burning wood, the flame may go away as long as it's pointed at it, but wouldn't it burst into flames again immediately upon removing the suppressor beam, or even explode due to a build-up of combustible vapors?
Best,
--PeterM
It's just like an evil Italian scientist to bring a Tesla coil to a firefight.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
This sounds like a Popular Mechanics article from the 1930's. "Fighting Fires With Beams Of Electricity -- From Zeppelins!"
Proverbs 21:19
Such a device could be used, for instance, to make a path for...
oh, police wanting to mow down a group of peaceful (or not so peaceful) protestors? I'm sure if this isn't vaporware that the Defense Dept. and several police departments would love to get their grimy hands on it.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Think of a flame speaker, but playing something really really boring.
Apparently, EM pulses have also been studied by the Pentagon for fighting fires http://www.stormingmedia.us/97/9736/A973683.html
The guy was showing some very neat videos of applying AC (not DC) to what was usually a methane flame in air, but they've also tried heptane as well (different soot characteristics). The gist of it was that the oscillation of the AC voltage was essential, and the whole thing is complicated by how some of the charged stuff accumulates on the electrode as well. If you feed in a noisy voltage (with the same RMS as a given AC), then it doesn't work. I can't remember much about the modelling he was doing, but it was at an early stage and captured most, but not all of the characteristics.
He also said he was going to try using a sootless flame (H2 probably), and then deliberately add in solids to see what happened - soot is just too damn complex to analyse in a system like that.
Or it didn't happen.
No brain, no pain.
Except if firefighters use electricity instead of water to extinguish the flames, they won't be wet.
It's not all from the fire suppression sprays. Some of it is called "sweat". Lots of salt in it so it's very conductive. Drops the skin resistance by several orders of magnitude.
People tend to emit a lot of it, coating their bodies, when covered with protective gear, toting lots of heavy fire suppression gear or rescued victims, jogging up and down stairs, or hacking their way through doors or walls, all in an environment where the ambient temperature is above that of the human body's homeostasis setpoint.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way