When something's gone wrong at sea, boaters have typically relied on flares: hand-held torches that can be waived at night to ensure rescuers quickly home in on a distressed vessel. The Coast Guard is now trying to take the fire out of the flare, and develop a distress signal that doesn't require any pyrotechnics.
Lots of search and rescue missions happen close to land, which means the Coast Guard is often looking towards a shoreline filled with all kinds of visual distractions: street lights, smokestacks, cars, and lots of other lights.
That can make spotting a flare tough.
"What we need is something that's conspicuous -- that stands out from everything else in the environment," said VinnyReubelt a scientist at the United States Coast Guard Research and Development Center in New London. He's working on a prototype LED flare, which would be programmed to flash at a specific rate using colors easily seen by human eyeballs.
Anita Rothblum, another scientist at the center, worked on developing the tech that would make the LED flare more "conspicuous" than a traditional flare. She said the team settled on a two-color flash pattern. "This way you're seeing something that flashes four times as cyan. Three times as red-orange. Then goes back to cyan. Back to red-orange," Rothblum said. "There's nothing else out there that looks like that."
The LED flare would also be battery-powered, which means it would last longer than pyrotechnic flares, which typically burn out in minutes.
VinnyReubelt said in field tests so far, the colored-flashing pattern of the LED devices made them more detectable than traditional flares, despite being less bright.
Coast Guard scientists are optimistic their prototype will create a new industry standard for LED flares -- one they hope will enter the marketplace in the coming years.
