A "sonic wave" oven. Several advantages: 1. You can stop the cooking and cool your soup to drinking heat by sending anti-sonic waves. (See the HB section PRODUCT:Noise Cancelation if you don't know what these are). 2. It wouldn't be harmful for you to open the oven's door, you just get a wiff of good music with the smell of your baking dish. 3. Research must be done with what kinds of new tastes will be recieved when cooking different foods to different sounds.
-- pashute, Sep 30 2002

Explanation with examples http://www.hait.ac....aAudio/project.html
http://www.hait.ac.il/projects/JavaAudio/project.html [pashute, Oct 21 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004]

The exact opposite http://news.bbc.co....hnology/2543085.stm
In space, no-one can hear ice-cream [coprocephalous, Mar 03 2006]

There's rather a significant difference in the amount of energy delivered by sonic waves to microwaves. (Or those idiots standing in front of the speakers at the rock concerts would be frying their brains instead of destroying their ear-drums, and ultrasound would not be a popular method of seeing one's unborn child.)
-- DrCurry, Sep 30 2002


10W of acoustic energy at 1m would deafen you. Moving coil loudspeakers are less than 1% efficient. 650W is the sort of power needed to cook a TV dinner in a reasonable time. 650W of acoustic power is roughly equivalent to a 65kW speaker rig. It would be like having a Megadeth stadium concert inside a 3 foot box in your kitchen. Even if only 0.1% of it escapes, that's one noisy appliance. Plus you have to come up with a transducer technology that is more like 80% efficient rather than 1%. Who wants to pay for 65kW of electricity just to cook a TV dinner? Not to mention the cost of the industrial 3-phase power supply installation. And no you cannot cool something with "anti-sonic waves", unless you are Dr Who.
-- shameless_self_reference, Sep 30 2002


I don't know about that. My father has worked on ultrasound his entire life. He used to make transducers for transesophagial use. (heart imaging) It was well within the ability of those transducers to boil blood. Now he is working on a product that uses ultrasound to break up clots in stroke victims and the major concern they are having going into medical testing is that it can cause burns on the skin and on other tissues. If you nabbed the resonant frequencies of the matter involved then it absorbs the energy very rapidly if the ultrasound is working in one of the harmonics of the matter. Easiest thing to do might be to just set it to resonate at a harmonic to water and thus it probably could cook it. Also with ultrasound you wouldn't hear a thing. It still would be less effiecient than a microwave as a lot of the energy is dissapated in the air which it travels through. but it could work
-- seal_clubber, Sep 30 2002


Dr. Curry, actually there's almost no limit as to how much energy you put into sonic waves. It's just that for music you put in a small amount (so as not to fry anybody).

You could definitely fry an egg with ultrasonic waves.
-- pashute, Oct 01 2002


Sorry, I was replying one remark at a time. Thanks seal_clubber. Shameless, as you see this is definitely possible. (Both parts).

Look up noise cancellation on the web. I have actually worked on a project of this sort at IBM.
-- pashute, Oct 01 2002


It's too bad.... I would really like to be able to cook my TV dinner just by yelling at it. Sort of like kicking the TV to improve the reception.
-- Wes, Oct 01 2002


pashute: I don't think you understand noise cancellation. It works by detecting the amplitude of a sound at a particular point and moving a speaker out of phase with that sound to deaden the noise. It would not cool your soup.

//I have actually worked on a project of this sort at IBM.//
I worry for IBM.
-- st3f, Oct 01 2002


Hey this is HALFbakery no?

Your probably correct that it is impossible but for the wrong reasons: There will probably be heat given off when canceling the sound. (The energy has to go somewhere...)

But this is only PROBABLY. It is theoretically possible. By the way your ridicule reminds me of what was said of the discovery of bats "seeing" by their ears.

For a full explanation including examples please see the new link (a project which I initiated when at IBM).

If most of the heating is done originally by moving the molecules at a certain (ultrasonic) frequency back and forth, and this is controlled by YOU (You are the source of the sound) then you can easily emit the cancelling waves. Thus effectively stopping the "heating" effect. Albeit the energy must be going somewhere - probably pass as heat, or as a high energy low frequency sound.
-- pashute, Oct 21 2002


Recently, visiting an electronic chip manufacturer's company, I was surprised to learn that they use ultrasonic heating for doing extremely high energy heating. The advantages are precise control, similar to microwave, but without the hazards!

About the cooling, it seems this is now the prevailing scientific physical explanation of what happens in vortex tubes.
-- pashute, Mar 03 2006



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