Forest Fire Suppression with Liquid Nitrogen
Every year forest fires ravage millions of acres of lands across the US and even more across Canada. Taming these fires with only helicopter access is a challenging problem in which aerial fire departments attempt to remove as much thermal energy in as little time as possible.
This presentation won the award for the most impactful engineering solution decided by a panel of engineering judges, and a more detailed writeup was featured in World Fire & Safety Magazine.
The work below only features work that I strongly contributed towards.
Our project began with extensive research about forest fires and heat transfer analysis to determine how quickly liquid nitrogen will evaporate.
The solution features a capsule design that has external fins and an open top.
Our calculations were confirmed and enhanced by drop testing from a 6 story parking garage
We reached out to the California Forest Fire department who provided critical figures about their current operations which let us show a path of implementation.
The capsule spirals down to the fire until it reaches a critical velocity where the fluid begins ejecting from the capsule.
Using empirical results from the wind tunnel and analytical tools such as Matlab, we were able to determine how the fluid projectiles out of the capsule while it's spinning. This was plotted in Matlab to help determine its efficacy.
Outcome:
When we combined the cost and time factors with our extensive heat transfer calculations. We determined that we the method of using liquid nitrogen capsules can cover vastly more area in a fraction of the time.
featured By Northeastern Embark
Final proposal for Northeastern University
Published in World Fire and Safety magazine
Team Members:
Diego Rivas, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, M.S. Engineering Product Design
Craig Martland, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, M.S. Mechanical Engineering
Andrew McGarey, B.S. Mechanical Engineering
David Marchessault, B.S. Mechanical Engineering
Yiannis Levendis, PhD (Advisor)