3 ms·
Wonder if they use a similar technique to putting out oil well fires, albeit on a much smaller/controlled scale. "Typically high explosives, such as dynamite, a
by WestCoastJustin 14y ago
Wonder if they use a similar technique to putting out oil well fires, albeit on a much smaller/controlled scale. "Typically high explosives, such as dynamite, are used to consume all the local atmospheric oxygen and snuff the flame out." [1] Granded, they are not using dynamite, but if they can duplicate the displacement of oxygen it could probably work.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire#Extinguishing_the_fires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire#Extinguishing_the...
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI wondered the same thing, and then I started wondering if you set up an infrasonic standing wave, what sort of pressure differential could you maintain? Could you drop the pressure in the nodal low spots down by a millibar? 10? 20!? That started me down the path of trying to figure out how much energy transfer was there in a standing wave and rather than run down the physics rabbit hole yet again, went back to work.
- ars 14y agoDon't you, by definition, have to drop the pressure by exactly as much as your raise it? Meaning just use the DB of the sound, and calculate the sound pressure.
- Someone 14y agoNo, that is different. You need three things to get a fire: - something to burn - oxygen - a sufficiently high temperature to ignite stuff. You only need to take any of the three away to extinguish a fire. According to the description, this spreads the flame over a larger area and decreases the depth over which burning can occur. So, it works by lowering the temperature. The "high explosives" method works by taking away the oxygen.