Firefighting technology hasn’t changed considerably in current history and fire in enclosed areas can trigger a lot of damage and potentially threaten lives. Now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the innovations arm of the U.S. Department of Defense – has pioneered a new way to extinguish flames employing sound.
As part of its Instant Fire Suppression initiative, the agency tested the potential to approach extinguishing fire from a physics standpoint, rather of trying to disrupt chemical combustion, which is how water puts out a fire. From a physics viewpoint, flames are cold plasmas. DARPA theorized that by utilizing physics strategies rather than combustion chemistry, it may well be achievable to manipulate and extinguish flames, reports IT World. They effectively use a sound wall blasting at a precise frequency to put out a fire by placing speakers on either side of the fuel feeding a flame.