Electrical Beams Can Be Used To Extinguish Fire!

What will you do if your room catches fire and you don’t have a fire extinguisher? The obvious answer will be that you will use water to stub out the flames. But I will tell you one more unconventional technique to douse the fire and that method is the use of a strong electric field. Yes, it is a fact that electric beams can be used to zap out raging fires. Researchers have found that they can suppress the flames by pointing an electric wand like structure in their direction and passing a current through it. However there may be a few problems arising out of this so don’t be in a hurry to replace all your office fire extinguishers and hose pipes with these electric substitutes.

Using electricity to counter fire sounds crazy and outright dangerous. But this out-of-the-box idea has been tested in lab and a lot of thought process has gone in the study of the effect of oscillating electric fields on fire. The research work was recently presented by Ludovico Cademartiri at the meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, California. The research is carried out by a team of scientists under the guidance of George Whiteside at Harvard University and Cademartiri is part of that team.

#-Link-Snipped-#Experiments and tests carried out previously had led to the conclusion that using a constant electric field on the fire had a little effect on the flames. However, Cademratri’s work focuses on the use of oscillating electric fields. And it is already proving to have a far greater effect. When the strong oscillating electric field voltages come into the picture, many different mechanisms come into action and they are so pronounced that they are capable of killing the fire. Sounds unbelievable but it is well documented and scientifically proven. In one of the lab tests, the team placed an insulated wire at the base of a 19 inch flame, and then applied power of 600 watts (this is almost equal to the power inside a medium sized microwave). The very next moment, the flame got smothered. Now, how this happened is still not completely clear and is somewhat shrouded in mystery. The scientists have various theories to explain this phenomenon. But the problem is that the complex nature of these flames makes it difficult to prove it using a single principle. One hypothesis says that the fire goes out because the electric field forces the charged particles inside the flame in such a fashion that the flame blows out itself from the inside. This theory is quite different from the one in which you blow air to extinguish a flame. When you blow air towards the fire, the flow is developed outside it and the air is pushed into the fire. In case of the electric field, the flow is created within the flame. This strong flow is powerful enough to separate the fuel source from the blaze causing it to snuff out.

It was also found that the effect of the electric beam is more pronounced when there is more smoke. This observation has led to the belief that the technology could one day be used to put off cockpit fires. The different types of applications depend upon the different sizes of flames on which the oscillating fields can act successfully. Electric fields could also be used to reduce soot deposition and pollutants due to flames. Let’s hope that this technology could be developed for some beneficial purposes. Till then use water or fire extinguishers to suppress the blaze.