alt Hacker NewsMexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds
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I will not ask if she patented it, or if others had the idea before, or if it is ready to be productized.
Just simply: it is great that young people, driven by personal curiosity, go and explore their ideas, find solutions to long-standing challenges.
Billiant, keep inventing!
This is really good. Firefighting foam is a terrible material, when entering groundwater, is a "forever" source of PFAS.
This seems to be a known technology but hasn't made it as a product.[1] It might have potential for very specific types of extinguishing, such as grills and grain silos, where the distance from extinguisher to trouble spot is fixed.
Wow, must be the same school that keeps pumping out students who invent water powered cars and machines that turn plastic into gasoline. HN with another YouTube shorts tier front page submission.
I wonder if she got the idea from https://www.sonicfiretech.com/
Infobae has more information (in Spanish) and a video demonstrating the fire extinguisher:
https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/08/27/se-puede-apagar-el...
Not exactly acoustic but reminds me of a high school science project we had one year, something along the lines of put out a candle with a contraption. My partner and I rigged up a balloon to be popped by the candle, and the balloon pop blows out the candle. Probably not an original idea, but I don't think any other group in the class tried a similar approach. Worked like a charm.
When an oil well goes off, high explosives can be used to extinguish it. Maybe this is the same principle.
very cool! Can we get a link to a not terrible website with real information?
> Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had.
...meanwhile, some folks at George Mason University were doing this back in 2015[1]:
> The fire extinguisher uses low-frequency sound waves to douse a blaze. Engineering seniors Viet Tran and Seth Robertson now hold a preliminary patent application for their potentially revolutionizing device.
Oooh.. from the title I thought this was about an extinguisher for when your guitar catches fire. Makes more sense now
Prove you are a human to continue.
No, I dont think I will. closes website
Cloudflare at the forefront of gatekeeping everything on the website
At other frequencies, sound can actually intensify flames, depending on the surrounding environment. Standing waves and the frequency of the sound (FM) are likely factors in this phenomenon. However, it’s not advisable to use sound as a method for extinguishing fires.
The article starts with a lie: Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had.
As others have mentioned it's not the first time.
So, is the reporter willfully lying, or is so incompetent that couldn't even do a simple Google search? I don't know which is worse.
when i was in the 5th grade (give or take a couple years), there was an innovation project where we were to bring in and present to the class an invention.
i remember a girl inventing what i now know to be a "flexible weighted dip tube" – think of it as a shampoo bottle that you can pump upside down – and was amazed.
like this submission, the flexible straw wasn't really invented by the student. at best it was independently discovered, but this patent was from at least twenty five years before: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3547296A/en
to that end, i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are – especially in the time of the internet when prior art is so easily discovered. or, did i miss the point?
> Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had.
Hate to be a downer, but this has been done before.
out of curiosity, would something like this hurt a human? I assume the sound waves must be pretty powerful to put out a fire.
..has been around for a long time.
DARPA worked on it 10+ years ago.
This is something from science fiction or a comic book. Super cool!
The reason this keeps getting reinvented is that the physics only half works. Sound disrupts the flame's boundary layer and separates it from the fuel, but it removes almost no heat. The fuel stays above its ignition temperature, so anything hot nearby relights it the second the speaker stops. DARPA demoed this in 2012 and it stalled there. Impressive on a small liquid fuel fire in a lab, very hard to scale to anything you'd actually want to put out.
Pangram reports 100% AI; it may be an artifact of translation, but...
I struggle to understand why this article is interesting or upvoted.
Well, a search for "youtube acoustic fire extinguisher" indicates it has already been invented a few times by people all over the world. The most interesting video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvnCQg4w4o8