Fighting Fire With Sound

Reported October 2006

HOUSTON (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- These students are on a mission.

"We're experiencing zero gravity right now. It's also the only place you can do that besides outer space," says a student from University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

On board NASA's "weightless wonder" airplane in Houston, these aspiring physicists and engineers test out what could be the science breakthroughs of the future.

"Our experiment is dealing with two-phase fluid flows through the current filtration systems on the space station," a student from Oregon Institute of Technology/Southern Oregon University tells Ivanhoe.

Students from Drexel University are working on how to processing bio-compatible polymers in two-g and zero-g.

And Dmitriy Plaks, a student at University of West Georgia in Clear Lake, Texas, says: "One of our main applications is for a fire extinguishing system aboard the international space station and shuttle."

Sounds easy enough, but here's the catch: Without gravity -- flames, water and hot air have a different shape than they do on earth. Water and foam can't always douse the flames in zero gravity. So the students are testing a theory -- using acoustics -- that sound waves can do the trick.

"In a zero-g environment, there's no up or down, so hot air or just any kind of air just sits there," Plaks says.

The team uses a candle and speakers to try and prove a theory that sound can cause pressure around a flame to drop, forcing it to go out.

There are some ups and downs with all the science projects ... And although the team didn't prove the sound wave theory in zero gravity here, they've shown that sound can extinguish small flames in their lab. The finding could help create new ways to put out fires in computer server rooms where water damage from conventional fire extinguishers can be costly.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Debbie Vi-Vi Nguyen
Public Affairs Officer
Johnson Space Center
Houston, TX
(281) 244-1334
debbie.nguyen-1@nasa.gov

The Acoustical Society of America
Melville, NY 11747-4502
(516) 576-2360
asa@aip.org
http://asa.aip.org

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