Comments | jeff_duntemann: Flame Speakers

jeff_duntemann

Flame Speakers

Sep 28, 2006 21:44

When I was sixteen, my friend Art Krumrey built a remarkable gadget that went on to be his senior high science fair project: A flame speaker. I spent a fair amount of time with him in his basement, fooling around with it, and it was a pretty amazing thing. He built it based on a description in ( Read more... )

electronics, ideas

Comments 15

ideas happy_hacker September 29 2006, 05:32:48 UTC

How about a fuel injector and a pressure pump to inject and control a fog of your salt solutions entering the flame?

Or perhaps, how about one of those ion generators used for air purification?

-Jim

Re: ideas jeff_duntemann September 29 2006, 15:59:57 UTC

That would work, though it's a lot of fussy metalwork, where I think hacking a piezo vaporizer would be a lot easier. One bit of caution is that when you dropletize a solution of copper sulfate and launch it into the air, as the droplets evaporate you will be creating extremely fine particles of nominally toxic dust. One bit of essential research here would be to discover a water-soluable ion source less toxic than most metallic salts. (First guess: Sodium Chloride!)

unkbar September 30 2006, 01:21:19 UTC

Ions is it you need? How about ozone? I don't need to tell an old Xerox hand that you can produce loads of it with a few thousand volts of electicity. Short-wave UV light would do it, too. With ozone, you don't need to replenish consumables. The raw maerial is air.

jeff_duntemann September 30 2006, 02:47:35 UTC

Well, my fear is that ozone, being oxygen, would just participate in the combustion of the propane if you injected it into the flame. Not enough of it would remain uncombined to make the flame conductive. IANAC, however, and I could be wrong about that.

The other problem is that it's tough to make electrodes that will survive longer than a few hours in a flame that hot.

anonymous September 30 2006, 07:55:46 UTC

In one of those odd bits of serendipity, I was thinking about these sorts of speakers just yesterday.

I was looking at some literature for some ultraviolet LEDs, and wondering if I could use them to provide enough ions to run a flame speaker. A few back-of-envelope calculations convinced me that I probably couldn't, not yet, but if the LEDs get a bit brighter, and a little shorter in wavelength...

Sam Paris

jeff_duntemann September 30 2006, 15:10:05 UTC

You mean, have the UV LEDs disassociate O2 into ozone? Wouldn't the ozone just combust the propane and be (instantly) gone? (See above.) We need to drag Roper into this; he's actually a chemist.

thanks anonymous December 23 2007, 23:42:26 UTC

I have been searching for someone with knowledge of the flame speaker for quite some time. Now that I have gotten over most of my fears about computer use I finally have located someone. I must say I am relieved to know that I was not just dreaming this up. Thank You. I will be looking into this further in the near future. ezrider.rebel@gmail.com

Flame Speaker anonymous February 24 2008, 23:27:07 UTC

I too came across an article on flame speakers back in the late 60's.I was about 14 or 15. It may have been Popular Electronics (I don't remember). I experimented with it in my basement and remember how amazed I was with the results.I recall my mother coming home from work late one night and when she came down to the basement where I had my flame speaker playing rock she calmly asked if the music was coming from the flame? She was use to me experimenting with odd things. Imagine "sound coming out of a flame"! I was coerced by my grade 11 physics teacher to enter the regional science fair. It seemed like a good project so I entered it. I still remember till this day the visitors looking under the table for a conventional speaker. I stand by my belief that kids are not as inquisitive or creative as they were before computers happened. We had to make our own fun.I sure did.