Is Fire Extinguisher foam Gas,Solid,or Liquid?

[Mode Xu]

Is the foam stuff from a fire extinguisher a solid, liquid, or gas? I want to know.

 

[CrashRecovery]

Foam is an additive to water. When sprayed it gets air into the mix and "suds" up. Fill a pot of water about half way then pour a bunch of liquid dish soap in. Start putting water in with your faucet and watch the bubbles appear. Same idea as foam

 

[PHugger]

A liquid will take the shape of any container it's put into.
A gas will fill any container it's put into.
A solid does neither of these.

I vote for liquidish.....



Best regards,
PCH

 

[markyoe]

I did a little research and found that fire fighting foam is just water, air, and a foam concentrate. A foam concentrate can be made of different things. The idea behind fire fighting foam is to " cool the fire and to coat the fuel, preventing its contact with oxygen, resulting in suppression of the combustion"

 

[Corbarrad]

All of them and none of the above...

It's a liquid, permeated by gas bubbles. Also, if you wait long enough it'll dry into a solid....

what hath science wrought..

Foam is an additive to water. When sprayed it gets air into the mix and "suds" up. Fill a pot of water about half way then pour a bunch of liquid dish soap in. Start putting water in with your faucet and watch the bubbles appear. Same idea as foam

I tried to make helium foam using dish soap and water because I'd seen videos of some company making "flying emoticons" by extruding helium-frothed suds through a cutout with smiley faces or what have you and then cutting the resulting foam tower, letting the figures float away.

I had planned to use floating blobs of foam as targets for our planes to hit during an event because i figured it was less likely to catch in props than a balloon as well as being more eco friendly than bits of rubber strewn across the place.

Turns out that commercially available balloon gas is only about 30% Helium, with Nitrogen making up the rest. If you want pure Helium it's not only much more expensive, but also comes in high pressure gas bottles which are illegal to transport without a permit here in Germany.

So that idea didn't fly, literally

Kind of a bummer, but then, there were free balloons with the kit the balloon gas came in, so at least we had something to target with our planes, and only one plane ever had its prop blocked and the guy still made a successfull landing so it's all good..

 

[Ron B]

Fire fighting foam that I used to work with came in 5 gal. buckets and you don't want to mess with that stuff. I won't go into what is in it but you don't want any of it to get on you or in you ( especially in you) and wash thoroughly after use. Now foam in a fire extinguisher I couldn't tell you about.

 

[KRAR]

depends on the rating of the fire extinguisher. There are different rating for different kind of flames/fuel.

 

[brian79cj]

There are different classes of foam. There are different types of combustibles. Classes, A,B,C,D. The foams are of different types depending on class. Some smother some float.

 

[Torf]

Believe it or not it is technically called a "foam". A foam is a type of colloid, which is a type of mixture (two or more different elements) if you are discussing chemistry classification.

Foam is the technical term for colloids formed with gas particles are suspended in liquids or solids.

 

[Epitaph]

I'm going to add the possibility of "non-newtonian fluid" purely because no one else has

 

[FliteTime]

It depends on the fire extinguisher, there are different types for different types of fire some have something close to baking power which turns to co2 when heated displacing the oxygen for stuff like paper/wood/rubber, some are compressed co2 which is cold but not corrosive to electronics like the powder for electrical fire, again cooling and displacing oxygen, there used to be halon which disrupted the chemical reaction, and then the afff or aqueous film forming foam which is for fuel, it floats on the surface to prevent the fumes/oxygen/flame chemical reaction. Then there's the worst, metal fires which need to be covered with sand or just drenched with water till it's done burning.