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
Watching that dude is like watching a child doing science and then using AI to explain the result. If he makes someone curious enough to do experiments on their own it's still a win though.
This channel (The Action Lab) is great, it sets an amazingly high standard for clarity of explanation, and for practical combination of experiments and theory, all while being appealing to a broad audience. Most educators would be extremely proud to produce work that's accurate to the standards of a university professor, while remaining appealing to middle-schoolers. I can't imagine what more you want from the content.
The real advancement, not brute forcing mathematical equations like some company does and claims revolutionary breakthrough. How many ideas like this has come from AI companies' models?
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.
Wow, must be the same school that keeps pumping out students who invent water powered cars and machines that turn plastic into gasoline. HN with another YouTube shorts tier front page submission.
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.
Generally, you get a lot of skepticism when you see an article about high schooler or teenager inventing or discovering something. This is not completely invalid because there have been lots of cases in the past where things like this are just fluff pieces and not actually real breakthroughs, more of a feel good thing. Add onto that that she’s a girl and Mexican and you get even more detractors of the shiftier variety.
I've seen a number of "child invents thing" news stories where the supposed invention was entirely bogus. For example, one widely circulated story in the late 2000s involved a young student in Nepal inventing a solar cell made out of human hair. Their supposed invention made no technical sense, and no one was able to replicate their results.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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. at best it was independently discovered, 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 point?
> i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are
Because if you independently invented it then it is your own.
The value to the student is not necessarily that the idea is novel to everyone else but that is novel to her. And of course the process of invention and development is something that many people never experience, and is valuable in itself.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but what I'm saying is that children deserve a little bit less froth-in-mouth reactions from us adults. Let's be civil, and give praise for curiosity... given that it takes none to be an armchair inventor.
On my read they are criticising the reporter, not the child. We definitely should be careful, in situations like this, not to be nasty to the kids involved. But I think we should still be allowed to be upset by bullshit, and strongly criticize the bullshitters, even when they are bullshitting about a child.
It's a standard subwoofer speaker/driver put in a ported enclosure, running at 30Hz, creating a particularly "fast punch" sub. The design of this would have all the same goals of a normal subwoofer: moving a bunch of air at low frequency. You can buy this sort of design to listen to music in your car [1]. It all runs on 12 volts because it's standard car audio equipment.
Subwoofers can definitely harm human ears, but definitely not human flesh. Just don't put your ear up to it.
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.
Yes, I kind of discovered that in a dream, in which I extinguished a fire by teleporting away oxygen. It worked, until I stopped teleporting. The oxygen came back and the fire started again. When I eventually woke up I thought about it and I told to myself that I should have chilled the place, not that it matters in real life. I was also proud of my subconscious' understanding of physics.
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.
Same application spectrum as CO2 fire extinguishers I'd imagine (which we use for expensive lab hardware that we don't want to get damaged by water, foam, ..., but which are utterly useless for anything more substantial becuase it just reignites).
74 comments:
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
There is a saying that ideas are cheap. Only delivery matters.
Wasn't it Edison that said that!
Probably stole it from Tesla... :)
Watching that dude is like watching a child doing science and then using AI to explain the result. If he makes someone curious enough to do experiments on their own it's still a win though.
I'll bet that high school girl's science was better than what's in that youtube (it doesn't set a very high bar)
This channel (The Action Lab) is great, it sets an amazingly high standard for clarity of explanation, and for practical combination of experiments and theory, all while being appealing to a broad audience. Most educators would be extremely proud to produce work that's accurate to the standards of a university professor, while remaining appealing to middle-schoolers. I can't imagine what more you want from the content.
that comparison says more about you than about how high school girls science is
I will not ask if she patented it, or if others had the idea before, or if it is ready to be productized.
Just simply: it is great that young people, driven by personal curiosity, go and explore their ideas, find solutions to long-standing challenges.
Billiant, keep inventing!
The real advancement, not brute forcing mathematical equations like some company does and claims revolutionary breakthrough. How many ideas like this has come from AI companies' models?
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.
[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/8/4/129
Wow, must be the same school that keeps pumping out students who invent water powered cars and machines that turn plastic into gasoline. HN with another YouTube shorts tier front page submission.
I wonder if she got the idea from https://www.sonicfiretech.com/
Infobae has more information (in Spanish) and a video demonstrating the fire extinguisher:
https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/08/27/se-puede-apagar-el...
This is really good. Firefighting foam is a terrible material, when entering groundwater, is a "forever" source of PFAS.
When an oil well goes off, high explosives can be used to extinguish it. Maybe this is the same principle.
Paul Neal "Red" Adair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair
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.
very cool! Can we get a link to a not terrible website with real information?
Bold of you to assume there is real information behind this.
I have a hard time charitably interpreting this comment. Care to explain?
This sounds like a cool science fair project being blown out of proportion by the media.
"Cool clock, Ahmed"
Generally, you get a lot of skepticism when you see an article about high schooler or teenager inventing or discovering something. This is not completely invalid because there have been lots of cases in the past where things like this are just fluff pieces and not actually real breakthroughs, more of a feel good thing. Add onto that that she’s a girl and Mexican and you get even more detractors of the shiftier variety.
I've seen a number of "child invents thing" news stories where the supposed invention was entirely bogus. For example, one widely circulated story in the late 2000s involved a young student in Nepal inventing a solar cell made out of human hair. Their supposed invention made no technical sense, and no one was able to replicate their results.
Pangram reports 100% ai
Pangram does not work reliably on single, short sentences.
> Performing security verification
> Verify you are human
Does anyone else command + w on first sight of a cloudflare screen?
I'll tolerate that but that new QR recaptcha that wants a selfie is 'hell fucking no' from me 100% of the time.
There are captchas that demand selfies now? I have never heard of that before and it sounds completely crazy.
Screw that
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/googles-camera-ba...
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.
Nah, I just have my clanker deal with it. It's better at those stupid puzzles than I am.
Cloudflare doesn't do puzzles. It either says you're a bot or you're not a bot.
Patchright is a patched playwright that clears turnstile and other similar automation hostilities
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.)
Right. Because IP addresses uniquely identify people. /eyeroll
Even if I were behind CGNAT (which I'm not), you don't see that message if you're already blocked. They won't even serve you the signup page then.
> 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.
[]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10569115B2/en
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPVQMZ4ikvM
US military showed a version in 2012 [1], and there is a DARPA report[2]
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...
It’s frustrating that the site wrote that. I’d wager a taco that she never made that claim.
Perhaps a shorter and less formal version of this science news cycle:
https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
Oooh.. from the title I thought this was about an extinguisher for when your guitar catches fire. Makes more sense now
Prove you are a human to continue.
No, I dont think I will. closes website
Cloudflare at the forefront of gatekeeping everything on the website
Why does it matter that she's Mexican?
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.
Or, you know... people like to know more about the bright kid who came up with a cool idea. Not everything is racism.
either one, yeah
Because it's a Chilean blog about feel good stories in Latin America, just like it says on the tin.
Seems to matter to you
No, it doesn't. You're just making a baseless assumption. There's nothing wrong with asking a neutral question.
I wasn't implying anything, just wondering why it needs to be in the title.
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.
Instead of FM, maybe they can just use an AY-3-8910?
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. at best it was independently discovered, 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 point?
> i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are
Because if you independently invented it then it is your own.
The value to the student is not necessarily that the idea is novel to everyone else but that is novel to her. And of course the process of invention and development is something that many people never experience, and is valuable in itself.
I suspect she was pushed along by adults, with particular motives, more than anything.
Regardless, nobody involved is honest, and I suspect the honest ones were told the be quiet.
The article starts with a lie: Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had.
As others have mentioned it's not the first time.
So, is the reporter willfully lying, or is so incompetent that couldn't even do a simple Google search? I don't know which is worse.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but what I'm saying is that children deserve a little bit less froth-in-mouth reactions from us adults. Let's be civil, and give praise for curiosity... given that it takes none to be an armchair inventor.
On my read they are criticising the reporter, not the child. We definitely should be careful, in situations like this, not to be nasty to the kids involved. But I think we should still be allowed to be upset by bullshit, and strongly criticize the bullshitters, even when they are bullshitting about a child.
> Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had.
Hate to be a downer, but this has been done before.
https://acoustics.org/pressroom/httpdocs/150th/Plaks.html
for sure, a whole bunch of videos on youtube of various people using acoustics to put out fire. Including MythBusters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2niANODOvJc
But by a 16 year-old Mexican female?
out of curiosity, would something like this hurt a human? I assume the sound waves must be pretty powerful to put out a fire.
It's a standard subwoofer speaker/driver put in a ported enclosure, running at 30Hz, creating a particularly "fast punch" sub. The design of this would have all the same goals of a normal subwoofer: moving a bunch of air at low frequency. You can buy this sort of design to listen to music in your car [1]. It all runs on 12 volts because it's standard car audio equipment.
Subwoofers can definitely harm human ears, but definitely not human flesh. Just don't put your ear up to it.
[1] https://cadencesound.com/product/tube12vp/?srsltid=AfmBOoqdE...
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.
Seems like a standing wave thing to halt airflow rather than "overpower with Bill & Ted's Awesomeness!".
Depending on what they have going, it might be loud, might not.
..has been around for a long time.
DARPA worked on it 10+ years ago.
This is something from science fiction or a comic book. Super cool!
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.
Yes, I kind of discovered that in a dream, in which I extinguished a fire by teleporting away oxygen. It worked, until I stopped teleporting. The oxygen came back and the fire started again. When I eventually woke up I thought about it and I told to myself that I should have chilled the place, not that it matters in real life. I was also proud of my subconscious' understanding of physics.
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.
Same application spectrum as CO2 fire extinguishers I'd imagine (which we use for expensive lab hardware that we don't want to get damaged by water, foam, ..., but which are utterly useless for anything more substantial becuase it just reignites).
I struggle to understand why this article is interesting or upvoted.
The device is acoustic. Think of it as a babel fish for telling fire to stop.