- The roof, the roof is on fire! We don’t need to water!
If your house catches fire, it’s game over. Even if it doesn’t burn to the ground, all the water the firefighters will spray on it will surely cause massive damage to the structures and your belongings.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to extinguish a fire without water? Soon, there might be.
Sonic Fire Tech, a U.S. company, has developed a firefighting technique based on sound waves. The system produces extremely low-frequency bass sounds that can blow out flames in seconds.
Your stuff and your house should be safe, as the sound waves will cause next to no damage. What’s more, the sound system should kick in as soon as it detects the first flames, blowing the fire out before it can grow into a disastrous inferno.
With the sonic firefighting equipment in your house, you don’t need to stop, drop, and roll. Just stop and drop the bass.
All About Oxygen
But how can sound extinguish fires? That part of the technology isn’t actually anything new, as sound’s capacity to fight fire has been well-known for a long time.
As you might’ve learned in school, fire needs three things to burn: heat, fuel, and oxygen. Remove any of them from the equation and voila, no fire.
Out of these three, soundwaves attack oxygen. If you blast sound of sufficient volume or frequency onto a burning object, it causes the surrounding oxygen molecules to vibrate so violently that they don’t have time to get drawn into the combustion process.
That stops the chemical reactions required to maintain fire in its tracks. And just like that, the flames go out.
The problem with a sound-based fire extinguisher is, as I mentioned, the sufficient volume. For the system to work, the soundwave must be very strong so that it makes oxygen vibrate at the necessary speed.
You can probably imagine how this could be an issue. A regular fire alarm is loud enough already; you don’t need your home protection system to blow out your ears, your neighbors’ ears, and every pane of glass in a mile radius.
Bring on the Boom
Sonic Fire Tech has devised a novel solution to this issue. Their secret is bass, and lots of it.
The company has developed a unique system that produces sound waves with a frequency of 20 hertz or less. Human ears can’t hear frequencies this low, so it doesn’t matter how loud the sound blast is.
At most, you’ll feel the rumble of the passing soundwaves.
This system also doesn’t rely on regular speakers to produce the sound, either. Instead, the rumbles are generated by an electric motor that drives a thumping piston. Essentially, it functions like a high-tech kick drum.
As these bass waves wash over a fire, they’ll cause the earlier-described reaction in the oxygen molecules they pass through. Give the fire a few pulses, and it’ll be gone while your house is intact.
Well, a glass left precariously on a table edge might fall from the vibrations and shatter. But that’s a small price to pay for not having your house go up in smoke.
Sound Ducts
Another feature that aims to make the Sonic Fire Tech system more efficient is that it covers your entire house at all times. You don’t have to run around extinguishing flames by pointing a boombox at them (although that would be kind of cool).
Instead, the sound-generating motor-piston system is installed in your home’s attic or a similar space. From there, metallic sound ducts – sort of like AC ducts – run through the house, covering the rooms and the immediate outside area.
Finally, the system is hooked to a smoke detection system. If the smoke detector notices smoke, it will activate the motor and send a few bass blasts through the house to extinguish the source of the smoke.
In this way, the system should blow out fires as soon as they ignite, without allowing them to grow out of control. With the ducts opening both in and out of the house, it can address wildfires and domestic sources of fire alike.
Of course, no system is foolproof. So, to be perfectly safe, the system also alerts the emergency services to a possible fire.
Sonic Fire Tech’s system has caught the interest of California property owners, who have suffered from recent wildfires. The company is installing the first pilot projects and hopes to soon make the bass extinguisher available to the general public.
Even if you don’t have the ultramodern sound-based system in your home, you should still have a regular fire alarm. For a cautionary tale, read about the German fire station that burned down because it had no fire alarms.