Meet the Mexican Teen Who Won an International Gold Medal for Inventing Vortex Tech, a Fire Extinguisher Powered by Sound

Meet the Mexican Teen Who Won an International Gold Medal for Inventing a Fire Extinguisher Powered by Sound
Credit: YouTube

Ángela Karime Hernández Venegas is a 16-year-old student at a technical high school in Altamira, a city in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and she spent months running over 100 tests on a device she built to extinguish fire without water, foam or chemicals. The result was Vortex Tech, an acoustic fire extinguisher that uses low-frequency sound waves to destabilize a flame until it goes out. She took that invention to the International Science and Innovation Fair ISIF 2026 in Indonesia and came home with a gold medal.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum mentioned the project during her morning press conference on October 22, noting that the country’s Secretariat of Science and Technology had already reached out to the student. “She is a great example of hundreds and hundreds,” Sheinbaum said, pointing to Hernández Venegas as a model for what Mexican youth are capable of when given access to education and opportunity.

How Vortex Tech Actually Works

The device is portable and built from four components: a battery, a frequency generator, an amplifier and a speaker. It operates at around 30 hertz, a low-frequency range that produces vibrations capable of disrupting the movement of air immediately surrounding a flame. By altering those air conditions, the sound waves interfere with the combustion process itself, destabilizing the fire until it can no longer sustain itself.

Conventional fire extinguishers work by cooling the burning material, displacing oxygen or interrupting the chemical reaction that keeps fire alive. Vortex Tech takes a different approach entirely, targeting the physical environment around the flame rather than the fuel or the oxygen supply. The project falls under the Technology category for secondary-level students and was developed with guidance from teacher Arturo Hernández Muñoz, who accompanied the student through the experimentation and refinement process.

From a Candle Flame to a Gold Medal

The project began with something small. Hernández Venegas started her experiments trying to extinguish the flame of a single candle, then worked through adjustments and additional tests to explore how the device performed across different types of fire. Over the course of development, the prototype logged over 100 trials and demonstrated the ability to extinguish flames in approximately five to eight seconds. Tests at distances of up to two meters were also conducted, though those results were achieved under controlled experimental conditions and would require further validation before any broader application could be established.

The project also received the IYSA Semi Grand Award, which grants Hernández Venegas an invitation to participate in the online event I2ASPO 2026. The Secretariat of Science and Technology’s interest in the project opens the possibility of a deeper look at the prototype’s results and what continued development could produce. For a student who built her invention at a technical school in northeastern Mexico, the trajectory of Vortex Tech is now a conversation happening at the highest levels of Mexican government.

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