TLDR: We are two ambitious teenagers working on a moonshot to fight wildfires! Our next milestone is building a working prototype and we're looking for open advice on how to raise funds! We've spent 6 months, 300+ hours validating and understanding the problem, and have been working with drone tech company ARSAC Technologies for initial idea validation.

Who Are We?

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Hi, I'm Jesse Pound. I'm a bored engineering student ready to make actual impact.

I've spent the last year and a half pursuing mechanical engineering full-time in university while trying to balance projects on the side. It's been fun, but my courses haven't been overly useful or applicable for what I want to do and the sheer amount of work and time I have to put into them has been holding me back from making progress on projects that I'm actually passionate about, like Project Firefly. I'm ready to put a pause on my degree so that I can fully commit to this and make it a reality.

What's up, my lovely people? I'm Valkyrie Holmes and I'm a curious teenager on a mission to save the world.

I've been developing my skills in web3 development, electrical / mechanical engineering, and 3D CAD modeling during my 2021-2022 gap year. The past few months have been filled with events like NFT.NYC and DCentral Miami to learn and produce content for teenagers learning about the crypto space! I'm extremely passionate about making the world a better and more inviting space for women in STEM and hope to inspire others to pick up cool projects and create something new.

What is Project Firefly?

In the last 40 years, wildfires in North America have doubled both in size and frequency (source - see Figure 1), largely due to the hotter and dryer environmental conditions created by climate change. Yet in that same time, the technology we use to fight wildfires has changed very little and innovation in the industry has been stagnant. This is not sustainable. In order to effectively combat the increasingly dangerous and damaging fire seasons, we need to be using increasingly better technology.

Project Firefly aims to transform the way wildfires are contained by using vortex rings — fast-moving rings of air similar to the rings that dolphins can blow underwater (Figure 2). Vortex rings have positive pressure on one side and negative on the other, and when they reach the base of a fire they repeatedly push and pull the fire plasma off its fuel base. This essentially removes the fire from its fuel, which is one of the core elements needed for combustion (Figure 3). On a small scale, this back and forth motion is enough to fully extinguish a fire.

This technology is much safer, more efficient, and more sustainable than the status quo, wherein firefighters literally use chainsaws and bulldozers to clearcut boundaries around the wildfires (Figure 4). The focus will be on containing wildfires as opposed to directly putting them out because wildfires create their own local weather patterns and vortex rings would not be a feasible method of extinguishing flames on such a large and unpredictable scale. There is also not much room for change when it comes to actually extinguishing wildfires, it mainly depends on brute force and grunt work by firefighters. However, when it comes to containment there is a huge need for better technology. By mobilizing a fleet of drones equipped with vortex canons we can address this need and help prevent fires from spreading while firefighters work to put them out.

Wildfires can spread at rates of up to an entire football field every second (source), so containment measures are key to successfully combatting them and minimizing their environmental, health, and economic damage.

Research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVGMcCtPBm0

Mockups / Demos

Our Plan