Sound waves snuff fire
In 1857, Irish scientist John Tyndall recognized that sound waves could extinguish flames. Now, scientists hope that phenomena could lead to the development of new fire extinguishers that would be useful, say, in a spacecraft or terrestrially to avoid water damage from sprinklers. First though, they need to figure out why exactly sound can snuff fire. Most likely, the sound wave causes a drop in pressure that extinguishes the flame. From Scientific American:
In 2004 Dmitriy Plaks and several of his fellow students at the University of West Georgia tested whether sound waves can douse fires in hopes of using sound to extinguish flames in a spacecraft. They placed a candle in a large topless chamber with three bass speakers attached to the walls. The candle was lit and the Canadian rock band Nickelback's "How you remind me" was pumped through the subwoofers. Within roughly 10 seconds, once the song hit a low note, the flame was out, according to results published in 2005 in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.Link
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Perhaps the song in question simply sapped the flame's will to live?
They covered this on an episode of Mythbusters.
i usually vacate the area at the onset of sudden nickelbacking as well.
On the road we used to play a game of "blow out the Zippo with the subwoofers!"
Worked too.
PB
Indeed Mythbusters did test this: it was confirmed.
Right, and by the time you set up your amp and speaker, find a power source capable of generating the required wattage, and get close enough to the flame to do anything to it, someone will have come up behind you with an ABC extinguisher and put the fire out.
Fire is built with Air, Fuel, and Heat. If you remove any one of those 3 things, the fire goes out. There are WAY more efficient ways to remove the air than by using sound waves.
If a sound system at a rock concert can't extinguish flames, I can't see how this is gonna work on anything larger than well...the candle they tested it on. Plus, do you think that maybe to low bass note was pushing a great deal of air?? Air can put out a fire of that size too!
procrastinet wins the thread.
are there songs that work the other way?
If I recall from the Mythbusters episode though, they had to use crazy huge speakers, and extremely high volumes to put out the fires. So great, you've put out the fire in the space station, but now your astronaut's heads have exploded.
My a cappella group, Hookslide, was the group trying to put out the flame (I'm the guy on solo in the intro clip). Only our bass/beatbox was able to do it (even amplified), and there were some interesting things we observed.
His "buzz" (or "raspberry", as they call it in the episode) is accomplished by singing one note and "buzzing" another lower note by vibrating his lips. Usually, he tunes these to be one or two octaves apart, or on occasion a fifth apart. However, he was only able to put out the flame when he detuned these two notes from one another, creating "beats" in the upper harmonics. We discussed this on-site with the guys, and we theorized that it was not just the amplitude of the sound wave but actually the irregularity of it, which likely caused more air turbulence. This stuff didn't make it into the episode as-aired, in favor of blowing some more stuff up (who can blame them?)
A trimmed edit of the episode (with just our voice-related stuff) is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPCME5lSiXE
I could've told you that Nickelback blows.
I'm surprised that university students didn't have something more exacting to test with than pre-recorded audio. I have a function generator that would make it really, really easy to test different wave types and frequencies. Any audio lab has one, and most electronics labs do, too.
More evidence that Nickelback really blows.
Joining the "Nickelback sucks" party
No fair, I was going to say what #1 said. Further evidence that nothing can survive in an environment that is saturated with Nickelback.
"Phenomena" is the plural form of "phenomenon," not a synonym, substitute for, or fancier version thereof.
Thank you.
have fun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpovwbPGEoo
Good thing they didn't play Wham!'s "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go." That flame would have burst into an unstoppable fire dance.
I thought Mythbusters addressed . . . you know . . . myths. This was an award winning undergraduate research paper at the Georgia Academy of Science that year, as I recall. (I'm the secretary of the Academy.)
Plus . . . what the hell's a Nickelback?
change on a quarter for something that cost a couple of dimes
Hasn't anybody invented a gas fireplace that dances along with your Sinatra records? It just seems so inevitable.
didn't you look at the Rubens Tube video?
The one with the dude with the styling hair? That's why I asked. Hot as he was, I was thinking something a little more romantic to sit around while the flames dance to my Yma Sumac discs.
pop over to Instructables.com. They have a project you can build using a speaker at one end of the tube
... In space? The place where you can put a fire out just by opening a window, and you have to pay $x0,000/oz to import equipment?
Nifty experiment, lame justification.
Orbus,
Apollo 1?
In the first Gulf War, when Saddam lit dozens of oil wells on fire, firefighters extinguished them by creating an explosion that blew out the flame without reigniting the oil. Similar concept, but not new.
Is there a video?
much older than the gulf war
http://www.redadair.com/
As already said- Mythbusters did this. It's certainly a much, much older idea.
Beyond that- I suspect any sound capable of extinguishing more than a candle is going to cause permanent damage to any structures around its source, as well as any living thing close-by.
@KMOSER
As did Daniel Plainview et al in There Will Be Blood. Guess it's not as academic a case, but still, seriously awesome movie. And Johnny Greenwood was robbed.