Startup says sound waves can replace fire sprinklers; experts aren’t so sure
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I think they should integrate with the stove to automatically turn off the stove once the fire near the stove is detected.
My stove has wifi and since it’s induction that shouldn’t be very hard.
My question would be whether these infrasound systems are safe for humans to be around?
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Agreed, and if it's excellent for kitchen fires you could install a single system just for the kitchen. That would keep cost down while maximizing the benefit. I suspect that apartments wouldn't spring for a fully redundant system with their sprinklers, but might be willing to spend $1000 to cut the risk of the sprinklers going off in half. It could also be a good addition for homeowners and builders who are unlikely to install sprinklers at all, maybe enough to get a reduction in home insurance premiums.
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Has nothing to do with the spark igniter. Stoves increasingly come with solenoid interlocks that cut off the gas to the entire appliance if unpowered, they're actually required in some countries and will probably be required everywhere eventually.
If you have an interlocked stove and the breaker trips, gas is cut off. I am speculating that the move towards per device interlocks has discouraged the adoption of a more complex whole-house system that ties into a sprinkler system. I could be wrong, but seems like a fairly logical reason that you don't see whole home interlocks available.
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What effect do these intense low-frequency sounds have on the human body? What happens to someone who is in the area of the fire and gets slammed with infrasonic waves? How about a firefighter who might be in close proximity for potentially hours?
Not saying it’s harmful, but definitely deserves explanation.
Not saying it’s harmful, but definitely deserves explanation.
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And then a second infrasound system to extinguish the battery fire from the first system.
And then a third...
It's infrasound turtles all the way down.
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There’s not enough water volume available to turn on more than a handful of sprinklers at a time, and still have effective water flow getting to the fire. They all work based on a valve held shut until released by a heat-sensitive system, such that only the sprinkler heads that get hot from the fire’s heat will trigger.
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I wonder about applicability of this tech for spacecraft (such as space stations). Would it work as well in microgravity?
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I can imagine a lot of potential for infrasound fire suppression, except not as a general replacement for sprinklers, which are just so good at what they do. Could be a great supplement to sprinklers, where some percentage of fires might get put out without water damage. For instance, I could imagine a museum liking the idea that in [some percentage] of scenarios a fire would not end up triggering the sprinklers because the infrasound system would suppress a fire in time.
Yeah, the big value-add would be if you could get the same level of protection without the cost/risk of sprinklers, but the jury seems very much out on whether this system could accomplish that.
Yeah, the big value-add would be if you could get the same level of protection without the cost/risk of sprinklers, but the jury seems very much out on whether this system could accomplish that.
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Um that water pressure in a house where typically sprinklers are dry systems (at least up here in the northeast where you have to worry about freezing) use a electrical pump to run, so you get no benefit of that. Even large buildings are often kept pressurized by pumps, there is no way city water pressure is getting to the 30th floor of an office building or everyone at ground level would open their taps to a pressure washer level flow. You can be passive with a tank on a hill above you I guess or a rooftop, but I assume they use the pumps because that's what has worked.
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He tried to stop the fire though, not flee.
All of which is completely irrelevant to my response to Fatesrider.
You don't understand because you got lost in what you were replying to. Fatesrider asserted that "Residential use seems very misplaced, and grotesquely optimistic. People get a fire, and they typically run." I responded that no, I don't think people typically run, people try to stop the fire. Often in ways that aren't correct because of panic or they don't know better, but most people want to save their houses very, very much. Therefore a system which is incrementally better could have an application if it doesn't cost too much, interfere with something else, or have other downsides. It doesn't have to be a full substitute.
If you don't disagree with that then again I think you just lost the thread a little here.
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Based on Havana syndrome, people don't react well... But people also don't react well to being on fire...
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Around vs. in the beam of are different. The firefighters observing this presumably were OK, but I wouldn't step between the emitter and fire.
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A huge advantage here is retrofitting. I wish our house had a dry sprinkler system in the core to enable escape down the stairs in the event of a huge fire. Since cutting the walls and pulling pipe would be prohibitive it's never going to happen. But this presumably is electrical wiring and some emitter (like a subwoofer). Maybe I can drag my subwoofer over to the stove and play same seriously deep bass? The kind you hear when those tinted window Honda civics go by that vibrate you in your car nearby with the windows up?
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The most promising application is exactly what was shown: early warning for range hoods to put out grease fires quickly. Grease fires are relatively easy to put out and have them stay out because they don't stay smouldering like a class A fire, which usually requires water or a powder extinguisher. They are among the most common source of household fires, and because they are in an area where fire is common, most things around the stove are already heat and fire resistant. If they can be extinguished quickly it can result in basically no damage from the fire or the extinguisher. And water, while it's excellent at stopping most fires is not ideal for grease fires, so it's an area where sprinklers are not ideal.
That said, there are lots of options for range hood extinguishers: totally passive systems that release powder in response to heat, automated systems using CO2, liquid, foam, or powder. The have long since been required in many commercial settings but not common in residential applications mostly because they aren't required. I think in a lot of commercial kitchens they have multiple systems: manually operated systems that a user can activate with almost no interruption, or automated systems that take over if the fire grows a bit more out of control.
That's why I'm super skeptical of this. I think there is very little chance this can compete with sprinklers for fires in general living spaces, or that they will ever be accepted as a legal alternative for sprinklers where sprinklers are required. On the other hand, in a range hood application or other targeted location they haven't compared against the existing tech. If there were were a mandate for home cooktops to have fire suppression, would this technology be better than the other options that are already out there? Would it be cheaper, more effective, cause less damage from false alarms? Require less maintenance? Be easier to retrofit in an existing kitchen? Some of those might be yes, but their positioning of it against sprinklers makes no sense.
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Would be pretty cool to have active fire suppression in normal residences.
I’d worry the system’s passive operation would cause cognitive mistakes a-la hauntings. https://futurism.com/health-medicine/scientists-explain-ghosts
But maybe fear of the afterlife would improve the world a bit.
I’d worry the system’s passive operation would cause cognitive mistakes a-la hauntings. https://futurism.com/health-medicine/scientists-explain-ghosts
But maybe fear of the afterlife would improve the world a bit.
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Does anyone know if this could be combined with water mist or vapor in order to add phase change cooling? I would think that would be an effective compromise by providing some of the benefits of sprinklers while reducing the associated water damage.
And if I'm understanding the principal at work here, wouldn't the infrasound help to vaporize and suspend the water to be even more effective at cooling? Or would the opposite happen with the sound causing the water to condense? Would the change in density reduce the effectiveness of the sound waves? I seem to have a lot of questions. I'd love to know the answers.
And if I'm understanding the principal at work here, wouldn't the infrasound help to vaporize and suspend the water to be even more effective at cooling? Or would the opposite happen with the sound causing the water to condense? Would the change in density reduce the effectiveness of the sound waves? I seem to have a lot of questions. I'd love to know the answers.
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In fact they do. Gas flow is regulated by a valve solenoid. No power? The solenoid will not open and flow gas. It sucks during a power failure if you don’t have electrical backup, which I do. You wouldn’t be able to use the stove or oven in my case otherwise, it’s a single unit.
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Yes, there are refrigerators that use sound to do the cooling:
https://purdue.edu/uns/html4ever/1997/9706.Mongeau.refrig.html
It is called thermoacoustic refrigeration.
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Can you talk more about "fireproof covers"? I have heard of fire blankets for wildland firefighters to protect themselves in case of a fire, but nothing about a fire "blanket" to put out fires. I am curious.
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These kinds of thing are very jurisdiction specific, not all building codes are the same.
When working in Romania my gas stove cut off, and so did my gas heating - I called my airbnb host in confusion - had there been a gas shutoff to the street? No. I had just cooked with wine and the hydrocarbon detector had cut off the gas mains to the property as it couldn't distinguish the alcohol in the air from a methane leak. I'd never even heard of such a system, having never encountered anything like that in the UK.
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They're woven fibre glass blankets ( when I was a kid they were still asbestos ). There's nothing especially complicated about them, putting out a fire with fabric is a fairly common tactic - chip pan fires for example were very common in England when I was a kid and a wet tea towel was taught as the optimum method to extinguish them.
Did your chemistry classroom at school not have such things? Mine certainly did - as well as buckets of sand.
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Indeed.
The answer so often is "it depends."
A great first layer is a fire blanket, as others having mentioned. Cheap, safe, not messy and will handle any cooking fire (half of residential fires per article) if observed in reasonable time, which will be often and hence produce a strong net positive statistical effect.
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Just Google 'fire blanket'--they sell them everywhere. I've seen Youtube reviews that show that the really cheap ones are somewhat questionable in effectiveness though.
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I am not sure this system would be suitable for datacenters. The extinguishers in a datacenter have the unfortunate side effect of making so much noise when the gas is released (over 130 dB) that it makes the platters in hard drives vibrate causing physical damage to the platters or drive heads. (Although mitigations are available)
I can see this system having the same effect.
I can see this system having the same effect.
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I like when folks mock Havana syndrome, then technology like this is demonstrated.
Small leap to deploy a lesser-energized version for long-term anti-personnel programmes.
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Suspenders and a belt. (Also, interesting but not surprising to see you here.)
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Even people you'd think would know better.
No shit, there I was...
When I was in the Army, 3 of us were installing conduit for network wiring in a building. Drilling a fairly good size hole through a concrete block wall close-ish to some vending machines. Stuff started arcing and sparking. The other 2 guys took off down the hall, I ran over to the electrical panel and started flipping breakers.
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Thanks for the replies. This is completely new info to me, but very good info to learn. Thanks!
PS: American high-school chemistry class was 38 or 39 years ago for me. I remember the pretty new girl in school, Carla, sat next to me due to seating assignments. And I remember buckets of sand. That is about it.
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I can understand why there is no national building code. You have very different soil compositions, architectural styles/preferences, weather patterns, regional risk factors such as tornadoes, earthquakes, flooding, etc. It's impossible to unify this into a single code without making the code extremely complex and/or forcing large regions to overengineer aspects of construction that are not relevant to their area, such as building to prevent frost heave in warm areas, seismic standards in areas where it's not relevant, or electrical grounding requirements for poorly-conductive sandy soils in locations full of wet clay.
It IS annoying that every single town and county in the US has local variations. For example, my town has a different requirement for ground rod placement from the next town over that shares a border with our town and has the exact same soil conditions. There does need to be some unification done, because the having the building code change from one town to the next is wildly inefficient, confusing, and costly.
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Again, you haven’t read model codes. They all have those provisions. Just localities override those provisions to insert their own. Not for any reason but local control.
Another great example is that every code adoption pulls out the accessibility portions of the code, since it is overridden elsewhere.
Codes are incredibly balkanized but they shouldn’t be. The approach is the same. The rigor should be evenly applied to all situations. Not because a local permitting authority likes his own version.
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Visual analysis for local alarming could also be useful for alerts for unattended cooking and even more of an alert for hazardous conditions. Of course, tuning that for different users and use cases would probably be really annoying.
Technological safety features versus gas elimination will be interesting see how they play out in different regulatory regions. While the replacement market will last as long as the older buildings that still have utility gas or on-site tank(s) do, they will presumably shrink to require electric-only replacement eventually.
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This was explicitly covered in the article. It is code in California.
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I was thinking along similar lines. High pressure (~1500 psi, usually pressurized by a nitrogen bottle) mist sprinkler systems have been shown to knock down a fire just as well as conventional sprinkler systems while using considerably less water and doing less water damage. But, like a regular sprinkler system they're not directional. What if a high pressure mist system put finely divided droplets of water into the air, and infrasound pushed them towards the heat source, where the 1200:1 volumetric expansion when water turns to steam displaced the oxygen at the heat source? One might be able to put fires out using even less water. It's worth noting that a lot of small diameter stainless tubing has a high pressure rating, which takes a big part of the challenge out of plumbing high pressure low volume water.
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North America doesn't use wood construction because it's bad and we're stupid. It's actually superior in some ways for our significantly more extreme weather and climate. Brick and concrete can crack under wind, earthquake, and temperature stress and you really don't want to be in a heavy rock house when a tornado blows it apart. It also allows houses to cool down faster in extreme temperatures whereas concrete absorbs a lot of heat and then keeps releasing it over time (fine for winter, bad for our largely very hot summers). Wood is also a better acoustic dampener and makes houses quieter. And we also have absolutely enormous natural resources so it's plentiful and lower-cost.
Wood is better than you might expect in fires as charred wood holds structural integrity pretty well, and modern building codes require flame resistant drywall and insulation. Most people die of smoke inhalation from objects inside their houses burning anyway (not everything in Europe is fire retardant, be serious). We also have stricter residential fire safety regulations for residences generally.
Yes, there are negatives to wood as well. Everything is a trade-off. In a major fire, there's more structural damage to repair with wood. But for our climate and resources, wood is often a better pick for residences.
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I'm not sure what's there to say: the kinds of blankets you're thinking of are more insulative and not meant to be in direct contact with fire or burning material, whereas the ones I am talking are not meant to insulate one from the heat but rather to be in direct contact with fire and/or burning material and to suffocate it by preventing it from getting enough oxygen.
I'm not sure if there's really any practical difference between the two different kinds, but at least that's how it's been explained to me, ie. that they prioritize different things.
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I once put out a fire in an engine bay from motor oil getting spilled on a hot turbocharger with a suede jacket and it didn't even get singed. It doesn't take a lot to smother a fire if it hasn't gotten too big.
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It's infrasound. You literally can't hear it. Human hearing cuts off below 20Hz. You will feel it instead of hearing it. May cause dizziness and nausea, but not hearing damage.
Now, elephants, giraffes, hippos, and whales, who can hear these frequencies, would definitely be bothered by this. So, it's best you don't have these in the same house with this system.
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