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Video: Darpa’s ‘Wall-of-Sound’ Fire Extinguisher

Darpa is showing off a new system that can put out flames using only sound. It’s part of the U.S. defense agency’s “Instant Fire Suppression” program.

at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) have published the video alongside details of how the technique was achieved in their labs back in December 2011.

Wired U.K.

The team arranged two speakers either side of a liquid fuel flame to demonstrate how fire can be controlled by amping up an acoustic field. The sound increases air velocity, which then thins the area of the flame where combustion occurs, known as the flame boundary. Once the boundary area is thinned, the flame is easier to extinguish. At the same time, the acoustics are disturbing the pool of fuel and creating higher fuel vaporisation — this widens the flame, thinning it out so it is less concentrated and cool enough to extinguish.

Even better, the sound does not even need to be offensively loud to achieve any of this.

“We have shown that the physics of combustion still has surprises in store for us,” commented Darpa manager Matthew Goodman in a statement. “Perhaps these results will spur new ideas and applications in combustion research.”

Manipulating fire with sound is not a new trick. In the 1900s German physicist Heinrich Rubens demonstrated the technique using a length of pipe with holes punched along the top. One end was sealed off with a sound speaker attached, the other sealed off and fixed with a gas supply. After lighting the gas leaking from one of the holes and changing the sound frequency being emitted, the height of the flames could be manipulated.

Darpa, however, first announced its plans to research the viability of electromagnetism and sonic waves in fire extinguishing only in 2008, saying “despite extensive research in this area, there have been no new methods for extinguishing and/or manipulating fire in almost 50 years.”

The Instant Fire Suppression project was specifically launched to devise new ways of tackling fires in enclosed spaces, such as aircraft cockpits and ship holds, where fires are obviously devastating and incredibly difficult to control.

The premise of the research is that, since flames need a stable supply of cold plasma to persist, manipulating the flow of cold plasma could be the answer to more efficient fire extinguishing techniques.

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Tiny 2-Foot Missile Could Be ‘Months’ Away From Drone War

The drone war could be shrinking faster than anyone expected. Raytheon’s teeny, tiny drone missile might be ready to arm a small drone within months, the defense giant says.

Since 2009, Raytheon has been experimenting with what it understatedly calls a Small Tactical Munition. It’s a laser-guided missile less than two feet long and barely a 10th the weight of the Hellfire missiles that the iconic Predators and Reapers pack. And the wait for it may be almost over: “We’re just tweaking the software and running some environmental tests,” a business manager for Raytheon’s missile division told AIN Online.

That would open new worlds of possibility for the U.S. drone arsenal. There are a lot more small drones than there are Preds and Reapers. The small-fry robots are used as flying spies, since they’re too lightweight to arm — until now. The Small Tactical Munition is supposed to arm the Shadow, a drone that’s only 12 feet long. The U.S. fleet of killer drones would significantly increase. Alternatively, the existing, large killer drone fleet could carry far more weapons than they currently do.

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Never Mind: Military Doesn’t Think Iran’s Missiles Will Reach U.S. After All

U.S. ballistic missile interceptor. Photo: Navy

Another year, another Pentagon report on Iran’s military power. Which means another round of imprecise predictions about when Iran may first test an intercontinental ballistic missile. But this time, the Pentagon no longer believes a future Iranian missile will be able to strike America. And another reason not to worry: Even if Iran does develop one, it’ll probably suck.

The shift can be seen in a sentence in this year’s Annual Report on Military Power of Iran (.pdf), first provided to Bloomberg by the Pentagon. The report warns: “With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran may technically be capable of flight-testing an intercontinental ballistic missile by 2015.” Which sounds scary. But it’s actually a less gloomy estimate than the last Pentagon report on the subject, which came out two years ago.

Back then, the Pentagon said that Iran could produce a missile “capable of reaching the United States by 2015.” Now, there’s no reference to such a missile being able to hit any place outside of the Middle East or Eastern Europe, let alone America. All the Defense Department is saying is that Iran might be able to conduct its very first flight test of such a weapon. Then again, it might not.

Before you ask: This isn’t just an accident of editing. Words are chosen very carefully in the Pentagon’s assessment of the U.S.’s number-one enemy. This means Americans can sleep safely: The Pentagon doesn’t believe an Iranian ICBM will obliterate the East Coast any time soon. The Pentagon also follows a shift from the United States’ spy agencies, which used to hype Iran’s missile threat to the homeland but then quietly hushed on the estimates.

And that’s all moot without Iran acquiring “sufficient foreign assistance.” Iran’s not going to develop an ICBM on its own, the report suggests. It’s likely North Korea regularly shares missile components with Iran, and has done so — to some extent — since supplying Iran with Scuds during the Iran-Iraq War. (.pdf) Problem is North Korea’s long-range missile program has a 4 for 4 record of failures, including such missile stunts as blowing up prematurely and flopping into the sea.

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U.S. Has No Idea Who’s a Taliban ‘Leader,’ Still Boasts About Killing Them

Taliban fighters line up to hand in their guns to the Afghan government during a “reintegration” ceremony, May 2012. Photo: Flickr/ISAF

Since January 2011, the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan claims it’s killed or captured over 100 insurgent “leaders.” Too bad it doesn’t have any clear idea what “leader” means. Any insurgent who commands another person apparently qualifies. And worse, by that criteria, Taliban and aligned insurgents have killed twice as many U.S. troops in the same time period.

According to Danger Room’s count, since January 2011, ISAF troops have killed or captured at least 104 insurgent leaders. You might expect the insurgency to be battered from the loss of so many senior commanders in such a short period of time.

That’s the impression left from press release after press release. “A Taliban leader,” who happens to be an “explosives expert,” was taken into custody in Kandahar on July 8. Two days before, an airstrike killed “the Lashkar-e-Taiba insurgent leader Ammar” in Kunar Province. The day before that, the NATO command in Afghanistan, known as ISAF, killed “a senior Taliban leader,” Nek Mohammed, in the northern province of Sar-e Pul.

But what ISAF isn’t disclosing is that it doesn’t have any clear criteria for who it considers an insurgent leader. “The ISAF Joint Command does not have a specific definition for insurgent leaders in terms of geographical responsibility or numbers of men under command,” ISAF said in a statement provided to Danger Room. “In general, when we refer to an insurgent or terrorist leader, it is a member of an insurgent or terrorist organization who leads a number of insurgents in conducting attacks, facilitating attacks or coordinating the provision of support to permit the continuance of the insurgent or terrorist activities.”

“It depends a bit on the levels at which you’re taking the leadership down to,” adds U.K. Navy Lt. Cmdr. James Williams, an ISAF spokesman. “Any group of people have a leader, [whether there's] two or more, there’s always one of those people who’s in the lead.”

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How to Fly the U.S.’ Trillion-Dollar Stealth Fighter Jet

Me in the F-35 cockpit demonstrator at Lockheed Martin’s northern Virginia offices. Photo: Blackfive’s Jim Hanson

The first rule of flying the world’s most advanced fighter jet: Do not push the red button until you absolutely mean to.

As soon as the display appears on the screen in front of me, indicating that I’ve arrived over the enemy airfield I’m meant to destroy, an oblong icon representing an AIM-120C air-to-air missile goes shooting across my field of vision. “OK,” says the Lockheed Martin executive who’s letting me fake-fly the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, “so it looks like you released your weapon a little early.” No jokes, thank you.

Any Navy, Marine Corps or Air Force pilot who steps into an F-35 cockpit already knows not to do that. But when they’ll actually climb into one of these cockpits is an open question. The Pentagon has stopped predicting when the much-delayed jet will join the military’s airfleet. And with a trillion-dollar price tag, the F-35 program is starting to look like the Dom Perignon of fighter aircraft at a time when the Pentagon barely has enough for a shot and a Miller Lite.

This leads Lockheed Martin to welcome journalists into a mock cockpit, which they want to show is idiot-proof. (I quickly prove it’s only mostly idiot-proof.) I move my thumb off the dangerous red button on my right joystick, the one that makes the plane climb and turn, and shift my left thumb to one of the toggles on the left one, which makes it take off and accelerate. Now I’ve got a cursor moving across a cockpit screen filled with icons of planes in front of me and objects below me.

When the cursor stops moving, as if magnetized, and locks onto an icon, the object becomes targeted. Now if I push the red button lurking tantalizingly close to my right thumb, I will destroy it. On purpose.

The ease of use in the cockpit doesn’t make the F-35 unique amongst fighter aircraft. But it better work as intended. The F-35 is already an enormously expensive aircraft. And it’s increasingly looking like a target itself — a budgetary target.

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