

Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, typically works on morphing airplanes, thinking robots, and "kill-proof" soldiers. Now, the agency wants to help build a better fire extinguisher – by using electromagnetic fields or sonic waves, naturally.

Darpa announced today its new research program into "Instant Fire Suppression." "Fire, especially in enclosed military environments such as ship holds, aircraft cockpits, and ground vehicles, continues to be a major cause of material destruction and loss of warfighter life," the agency notes. And "despite extensive research in this area, there have been no new methods for extinguishing and/or manipulating fire in almost 50 years."

Typically, we've relied on chemicals like halons, to choke out flames. But halons are on the way out, because "their depletion of the Earth's ozone layer." And all of the "halon replacements are inferior in performance and are typically toxic and/or ozone-depleting."

So Darpa is proposing "a radically new approach to both fire manipulation and suppression" – one centered around the realization that flames are, in many ways, electrical.

*[F]lames are a cold plasma consisting of mobile electrons and slower positive ions. This discovery... has its origins in the classic work of Volta in the early 1800s on the “electrical nature” of flames. Since typical flames cannot exist without a stable plasma, this provides an effective point of attack: control the plasma to control the fire. Control includes both fire extinguishment and spatiotemporal manipulation; the bending of flames by electric fields was first demonstrated in the 1870s. Spatiotemporal manipulation of flames could permit the creation of “escape corridors” in flame-filled environments, and achieve the spatial localization/confinement required to prevent spreading of fire to other combustible materials. *

Which is why Darpa believes that "the methods of plasma physics and chemistry can be applied to create revolutionary new capabilities for fire suppression. Possible candidates: Everything from "electromagnetic fields" to

"acoustic ion injection[s]" to "static electricity" to "chemical suppressants" to some combination of 'em all.

But don't expect sonic fire extinguishers any time soon. This project is going to require "breakthroughs" in how scientists understand and quantify "cold plasma composition, chemistry and dynamics in a hot flame environment." And, of course, there's the not-insignificant matter of actually building the thing.

So if you've got "expertise in flame chemistry and physics, plasma chemistry and physics, chemical kinetics, electromagnetics, theoretical modeling and engineering," get cookin'.

Photo courtesy NOAA