Just a quick update to my paper polygon post (http://michaellogusz.blogspot.com/2015/05/paper-polygons-and-rosetted-logusz-cube.html) with a toothpick and rubber tubing Icosahedron.
It was something fun to do while waiting for my pyrolytic graphite and 80uci Am-241 radioisotope to arrive. Yes 80 not 0.80, eighty micro curies of beefy alpha radiation to feed my polyethylene neutron oven.
So, I decided to make a box kite out of it.
With the scraps I made a teeny tiny box kite.
Fold the edges over.
There is a fascinating biopesticide that uses a virus occluded in a polyhedron shaped crystal. It's called Nuclear polyhedrosis virus (npv). It mechanically reproduces in beetle bodily fluids.
This is the unedited download of photos and quick notes from my successful quest to create sonoluminescence in my lab.
Sonoluminescence: if you vibrate water to ultrasonic frequencies (like a jewelry cleaner) you can get bubbles in the water to GLOW IN THE DARK!
I started by poring through the available literature on sonoluminescence, which is meager to say the least. I found that even though most seem to think that a spherical flask is needed-the only sonoluminescence kit on the market features a rectangular flask with hard edges and corners.
People say you need two transducers to make equal but opposite waves to create a standing wave, but I was able to trap bubbles better with a single transducer.
I obtained sonoluminescence with a single transducer located in two different positions (bottom or one equatorial side of the sphere). When the transducer was mounted on the equator, the whole apparatus tilted in the ring stand mount...but I got sonoluminescence just the same!
People say that you need a 25.1kHz or 25.7kHz wave for a 150mL flask. I found 24.23kHz and a few other frequencies induced the glow. Size of flask determines the frequency. Also, according to some: the temperature of the water and the amount it has been degassed plays a part...and that a 100mL flask worked better.
People say that you need a sine wave. Chen, et al found that triangular waves worked best!
People say that you need an oscilloscope to find the resonant frequency of your flask. I used the oscilloscope method, yet found it was faster and easier to just listento when the flask vibrated much more loudly than before while I twisted the knob on the signal generator.
People say you need to boil distilled water to degas it and that it will ruined after adding a few tiny bubbles, or go bad and need re-boiling after a day or two. I found that it doesn't matter: a bubble is a bubble and water is water.
People say you need to add a single bubble, ever so carefully. I took the eyedropper off of my original elegant design and stuck the tube in my mouth and blew hugebubbles into the flask to prime the flask for cavitation. This worked over and over successfully, over the course of days without fresh water.
So, is obtaining sonoluminescence difficult? No, just as long as you realize with water at room temperature the glow will be extremely dim so that you will not be able to see it unless you're in a very dark room with your eyes dark-adapted for at least 10 minutes. I worked for years in a photographic dark room...when I mean dark I mean no windows, at nighttime and with the door shut and the lights off in the room next to the room you're in: DARK!
The colder the water, the brighter the glow will be though: around 0° C seems to be the best temperature, as far as the literature is concerned-although as I've already seen, the scientific literature is not always correct.
Another pain: you need to put dark film over your signal generator readout window, and also it's best to build a cardboard box/light-shield around your ring stand to block out stray light.
Basically here's all I did:
Epoxy a 60 watt 25kHz piezo transducer to the bottom of a 150mL spherical flask with a round bottom.
Fill with distilled water and mount in a ring stand. Feed a sine wave from a signal generator to the *piezo transducer and listen until the whole thing vibrates louder (somewhere around 22kHz to 26kHz).
*My signal generator allows me to set the amplitude of the output up to 20 volts peak to peak, even so I elected to add a cheap $15 amplifier circuit board thingy from Amazon: I'd rather blow out an amplifier from Amazon than the output circuits of my signal generator. Even so, I was able to trap bubbles easily without the amplifier and without any need for an addition inductor circuit.
The super awesome $55 signal generator is "KKmoon High Precision Digital DDS Dual-channel Signal Source Generator Arbitrary Waveform Frequency Meter 200MSa/s 25MHz." Note that this goes up to 25mHz (Mega hertz)...but we only need 25kHz (Kilo hertz)! Make sure you signal source can go all the way down to 25kHz (kilo kHz). Some can't get down that low (or high, depending on its main usage).
The cheap amplifier is on Amazon, listed as "DROK TPA3116 Digital Power Amplifier Board 12-24V High Power Amplifier Module 50+50W Power Amplifier Chip with Volume Adjustment Potentiometer Switch Support PBTL 100W".
The 150mL flasks I used were only $5 as an Amazon Prime Add-on, but right after I bought mine the price went up to $45, LOL! "United Scientific FG4260-150 Borosilicate Glass Round Bottom Boiling Flask, 150ml Capacity (Pack of 6)".
The flask I used to heat water (not totally necessary) was "Corning 4980-500 PYREX Narrow Mouth Erlenmeyer Flask with Heavy Duty Rim, 100 mL capacity-500 mL capacity Graduation Range, Rubber Stopper Number 7, 101 mm Diameter". Amazon lists it as taking a number 7 stopper but it does NOT come with any stoppers!
The stoppers for the flask: "Rubber Stoppers - Size #7 - (Pack of 3) Karter Scientific 216R2".
I had the fish tank aerator hose laying around, but the capillary tubes were "GSC International 50001 GLASS Gsc GLASS Capillary tubes, 75 mm Length, Open on Both Ends (Pack of 100)."
The cheap, tiny piezo transducers only used to feed the oscilloscope and totally not needed except for fun were: "15 Pieces - 20mm Piezo Disc Elements with 4" Leads - Acoustic Pickup - Cigar Box Guitar CBG - Touch Sensor." This is what others refer to as their "sensing" piezo.
The other end of the sensing piezo goes to the vertical input of an oscilloscope. Again, this is totally unnecessary-but fun! If you don't have an oscilloscope don't worry: it's easier to just listen to when the ringing of your spherical flask gets way louder and higher pitched at a certain frequency!
The HUGE transducers sold out after I bought mine for about $22 each. On Amazon, just search "25KHz 60W Ultrasonic Piezoelectric Transducer Cleaner Ultrasound Transducer." Make sure you do NOT get the 40kHz ones...you want the 25kHz ones! 25kHz is 0.025mHz ; likewise: 25mHz is 25,000kHz which is a LOT more than 25kHz.
Here are two of these bad boys, one on either side of the sphere! Just a single transducer on one side worked just fine too, but made everything tilt in the ring stand. If you've got just a single transducer: mount it to the bottom of the sphere-it makes everything much easier.
Here is a smaller (100mL) spherical flask that was much easier to trap bubbles in (at a different frequency of course) that also came with an orange stopper and glass tube "Round Bottom Flask -100mL- w/ Glass Tubing and Rubber Stopper - Eisco Labs Borosilicate". I suppose this isn't really needed: you could just use a hose right into the water and skip the glass tube and capillary tube. You can also see the sensing transducer rubber banded to the side of it.
A couple of these wires came in handy, along with some scrap wires to hook up the big transducers to the amplifier "eBoot 30 Pieces Test Leads with Alligator Clips Set Insulated Test Cable Double-ended Clips, 19.7 Inch."
Some of the photos show various more complicated setups. Like my plasma demonstration fusor build, I find that less is more: better, faster, cheaper and easier to operate in the dark.
Fish tank air tube > glass tube > rubber stopper > epoxied in a capillary tube for smaller bubbles. The other end is an eyedropper, which I removed in favor of just blowing into the tube: worked better and freed up my other hand.
I opted to use a cheap little amplifier board purchased off Amazon for less than twenty dollars. The important thing was an AC power supply that could supply up to 5-6 amps! Most power supplies give less than 1 amp.
This power source for the amplifier is on Amazon, listed as "Kastar LCD AC Adapter 12V 6A with 3-Prong Power Cord Power Supply for LCD Monitor and LCD TV". You need lots of amps for this!
I tried the setup without the amplifier and it also worked, but I had to set the amplitude setting on my signal/function generator to 10-15 volts. This made me nervous about blowing the amp section of my signal generator-as opposed to the cheap amplifier board from Amazon.
Absolutely no inductor coil was needed in either setup.
For a dollar I bought a weird piece of equipment. I think it was for a hand-held router, to make a plunging/depth setting? I got it at Disabled American Vets (DAV) resale shop--much like a Salvation Army resale store. I was going to use it as a spare ring stand, but I put a transducer on the bottom, the spherical flask in the center and the other transducer on top: then I added Loctite 1C two-part epoxy and glued everything together.
Please note that Loctite (and may two part epoxies) does NOT like to be glued to previously dried epoxy. If your transducer falls off: you need to scrap, gouge, sand off the epoxy and basically use a new spherical flask (which is why the 6-pack on Amazon was such a great deal). Or you could clean the epoxy off the transducer and mount it on a part of the flask that doesn't have any old epoxy on it.
Of course, using these devices more and more I've experience failure of the epoxy and tried plain old super-glue (the kind that's the gel so it's easier to apply)!
Various readings with a cheap Amazon transducer rubber banded to the flask. It was like $5 for a dozen of them. People use them to make cigar box guitars with. They are cheap little disks like you find as the buzzers in smoke detectors (which you can harvest for radioactive AM-241).
As I stated earlier, you can just listen and you'll know when you found the correct frequency, but I wanted to use my 60 year old oscilloscopes for something fun for once.
This is a really adequate sine wave: keep in mind this is measured with the tiny, 75 cent piezo rubber banded to the flask and fed into a 60 year old oscilloscope, LOL. That's why it's sort of leaning backwards. With a litte fiddling you can get it perfect-but who cares, the important thing is that you're trapping bubbles and hearing the LOUD screech. The oscilloscope doesn't really matter.
Here's a photo of one of the cheap Amazon transducers rubber banded to the side: the wires go to the oscilloscope.
Here's the readout on the $55 signal generator. It says 24.95kHz and the amplitude is set to 10 volts. The amplitude in this case is just the "output volume" of the signal generator. Please note that this section of signal generator settings vs oscilloscope was when I was using the smaller 100mL spherical flask and not the 150mL.Either way: use what works with your flask/vessel. You can use rectangular boxes like a small aquarium and it'll be much easier to do the math on your standing waves analysis...plus you can more easily trap TWO bubbles at the same time (each 180 degrees out of phase from each other)...or just do a boring sphere like everyone else :)
Looks cool, but not a nice clean sine wave, LOL! Lissajous lines/figures as a result of odd/even natural numbers, since this Lissajous knot is open it's not a rational number. NONE OF THIS MATTERS FOR SONOLUMINESCENCE...it's just fun to see on the oscilloscope.
Here's something cool I tried that also worked: a neighbor threw away an LG flat screen television because like most LG flat screen TVs the damn LEDs burn out every 8 months. Bummer! Anyway, I ripped out the sound section from the TV and used it as an amplifier between the signal generator and the transducer.
As stated before, the colder the water, the brighter the glow...but room temperature water is just fine too. Here's my flask of water cooling: note that about half the water is gone from the superheating explosion detailed below.
Here's a boring video showing right after the distilled water I boiled got superheated and exploded. Plus and "after" with a toothpick to provide safe nucleation points. Distilled water, or tap water in a smooth vessel can't bubble-thus it doesn't boil. It gets hot (or hotter) enough to boil but doesn't bubble. Then, if you touch the vessel or coffee mug or glass or put something into the water like a spoon, sugar, your lips, the water will all boil at once: a HUGE dangerous bubble all at once.
If you are heating distilled water, place a toothpick into the container before you start adding heat. If you forget to add the toothpick do not add it after you begun heating: it will cause the water to explode!
The glowing water is almost as dim as my sphintheroscope (see my other posts). For that you need to wait 30 minutes in total darkness. Sonoluminescence with room temperature water with my setup takes about 10 minutes of sitting in darkness for the eyes to adapt.
What does it look like? Glowing swirls every time I breathe into the bubbler tube. As I tune the signal generator and get an extra high squeal and then breathe the swirls condense into a single glowing point! So, I was able to create and experience multi-bubble sonoluminescence (MBSL) and single-bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL).
Like a swarm of fireflies whisked up by a strong summer breeze...only to leave a single one hovering inches before my eyes.
I saw a firefly before my eyes once...it was delicious. Meow.
An hour of putting stuff together and glopping thermal paste yielded a nuclear cloud chamber that doesn't need dry ice!
The wine goblet is filled with 99% isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol which gets supercooled and turns into a fog in the the glass goblet. Then you can see alpha, beta, gamma and muon tracks zipping through the fog: visible radiation! I have various radioactive sample sources, plus if you put no radioactive stuff in the chamber every 3 or 3 minutes you'll see a particle zing through and that'll be the result of a cosmic ray interaction: a muon!
My other nuclear cloud chamber is MUCH simpler: an upside down aquarium resting on a metal plate that sits on top of a block of dry ice. I want to eventually bring this into work (I'm a librarian) and while the radioactive stuff is safe (unless you swallow it) the dry ice is just annoying to deal with after the awesomeness of it gets old: it's cold, melts (well, sublimates), will explode any container it gets sealed it, burns, little kids want to touch it...all not so great for a science demonstration. Plus the only place that sells it is the Walmart that's like 15 minute drive. With this design I just plug it into a wall outlet and dump in a little rubbing alcohol: bam! Coldness.
Contrary to what the internet says, my Peltier Coolers have their hot side on the printed logo side. I hooked a 9v battery up to them for less than 2seconds to be able to feel and mark the cold side.
Arctic 5 thermal paste works at very low temperatures. I didn't even finish the first teeny, tiny tube.
A lump of AM-241 getting a pure alcohol shower.
Starting top to bottom:
Glass wine goblet
Rubber gasket
Piece of thin plexiglass
Arctic 5 thermal paste
Peltier 12709 thermal electric cooler
Arctic 5 thermal paste
Peltier 12710 thermal electric cooler
Arctic 5 thermal paste
Cooler Master 212x dual fan (upside down)
Atx computer supply which provides: 12vdc, 5vdc and a shared ground.
Both fans and the bottom Peltier 12710 go to the 12vdc and the ground.
The top Peltier 12709 goes to the 5vdc and the same ground.
I used the ATX power supply I converted to a bench power supply a few posts ago because it has the two voltages I needed along with (most importantly) lots of amps! Wall wart power plugs can easily be found to give 5v and 12v but not at the large amount of amps. Wall warts usually max out at 1 or 2 amps but the Peltier Coolers take up to 10 amps! The ATX can provide 12vdc at a monstrous 28 amps.
How does it do? Here some video:
Note the curly particle tracks! In my dry ice nuclear cloud chamber I get lots of boring, straight and short alpha tracks-not these awesome whirly curlies.
Here's a video of the whole setup:
I thought it wasn't working until I moved the flashlight way far away. This probably collimated (narrowed and focused) the light beam. My dry ice chamber is foggy, but this electrically cooled chamber rains down the alcohol!
I'm happy it works. I'm happy it shows different types of tracks than my other chamber. Just add a piece of radioactive material, 99% rubbing alcohol and plug it in.
The Cooler Master 212X Fan and Heat Sink Unit It came with 2 fans. One fan was already attached. The other fan I needed to: attach two plastic brackets with 4 screws and then just plunk it on the other side. You get TWO little rubber pads that you must cut and make into FOUR rubber pads. You then stick these on the 4 screws OR ELSE THE FAN YOU INSTALLED WILL SLIDE RIGHT OFF THE FINS AND FALL ON THE FLOOR! For most applications that doesn't matter at all and if your fan might hit your RAM or something else leave them off and you can easily slide the fan up a little for extra clearance. However, since I'm making a mobile nuclear cloud chamber I put the four pads on--just the like the first pre-installed fan.
On the edges of the square fan bodies you will find arrows: one shows the direction of spin, the other shows the exhaust side of the fan. One fan should have it's arrow pointing toward the fins (intake/push) and the other facing away from the unit (exhaust/pull).
They included a TON of brackets, a cool sort of socket thingy to turn your phillip's head screwdriver into a hexonal computer board stand off wrench-thingy, rubber sticky pads and thermal paste. The thermal paste is fine, but since I'm trying to freeze isopropanol (and started at room temperature and not a hot computer) I needed a paste that could work closer to -50 C, so I just squirted some Arctic 5 thermal paste (and NOT the thermal EPOXY which will never come off). Let me repeat that: SOME Arctic 5 is paste and some is on-forever-epoxy.Get the paste.
How do you apply the thermal paste? If your application is round use the pea-shaped blob in the center and smoosh. If it's a square/rectangle use a spreader. On test after test on YouTube it really didn't matter. In my application my cold plate is plexiglas and I can SEE the thermal paste from the top-side of the chamber and had to use the spreader method (old credit card) to get it looking nice. Smoosh method and "hope" it's everywhere (it won't be) or spreader and "know" it's everywhere. LOL!
This is underneath two Peltier cooler tiles > plexiglas cold plate >rubber gasket and a big old wine goblet. Most of the aforementioned pieces are coupled with thermal paste. Power comes from an ATX computer power supply I made into a bench top power unit a while ago.
So, how is this unit itself? HUGE, tall, incredibly well finished on the cooling block. I just spun both fans up with a 9 volt battery and they: spun so fast I couldn't see them and were dead silent!
The Two Peltier Coolers I'm using two different Peltier Coolers (12709 & 12710) stacked to make the cooling portion of a Nuclear Cloud Chamber. This replaces the dry ice. The more powerful 12710 goes on the bottom, touching the Cooler Master 212X.
As a test I briefly hooked each to a 9volt battery. In less than a second, with the red wire going to the positive post on the battery the coolers became almost painfully cold one one side and warm on the other. The Cold side was the one with the model number printed on it.
Do not run these for more than a second without them being mounted to a heatsink with fans using thermal paste or else you'll ruin them.
Arctic 5 thermal paste is a popular choice. These can get down to -50C° and some thermal pastes only go down to -20C°. I'm starting with room temperature 99% isopropyl alcohol so I might actually get close to that bottom temp... The online spec sheets specify the Tmax Delta (how many degrees it'll cool from your starting temperature). The Rubber Mat (LASCO 02-1048E Rubber Sheet, 6X6-Inch and 1/16-Inch Thick) This is creating a seal between the cold plate (which is sitting on top of two Peltier cooler tiles) and a big old wine goblet. This rubber was REAL rubber. Good feel and that new car tire smell. I was able to easily cut it with a pair of scissors.
The sheet was really "floppy" and could conform to curves if needed. You could easily roll this up and line the inside of a coffee mug or something. Not sure why you'd want to do that, but it'd take zero effort: nice and bendy.
The only bad thing was that at the center of one edge was a retail hanger tag, the kind with the hole in it to hang off of metal rods in a store. It was STAPLED to the rubber sheet. Just a regular old small staple, and for my purposes it made no difference. Even if I were pulling a strong vacuum (which I'm not) the two staple holes would probably seal themselves up, plus they're at the extreme edge so it wouldn't matter anyway.
Well, that's about all the comments I can muster on a boring old piece of rubber, lol.
The Wrap Up
I get most of my supplies from Amazon. Some stuff I find in eBay and the Disabled American Vets' (DAV) resale shop up the street (just like a Salvation Army store). Many things I find in the trash. Except for my fusor build, which got me into the Plasma Club on fusor.net, I rarely buy things from actual industrial/scientific suppliers.
So, this project had some cool benefits: no dry ice, I got to see particles I never saw in my other cloud chamber, I got to use my ATX power supply for something finally. It was fun. It can travel/be set up without any dry ice.
On the downside: It's a much smaller chamber and harder to see what's going on. My fish-tank and dry ice nuclear cloud chamber can be viewed by an entire classroom. This chamber is probably only for a single person (holding a flashlight in a dark room) at a time. It's sort of fiddly: you have to hold the flashlight away at arms length and sort of tilt your head and squint and work to see it.
I tilted my head...but I can't hold the flashlight good. Meow!
This is the simplest answer I can muster to the question: "Why does light but not sound travel through space?"
Bullets can travel through the air. A
bullet can travel through water. A bullet can travel through the vacuum of
outer space. A bullet is amechanicalobject (an actual thing) that you can
shoot anywhere.
Waves
ofsoundcan only travel through air or solid
matter (a non-vacuum). Just like waves of water can only travel through water.
Sound is amechanicalwave. It moves through the air like
waves move through water. Take away the air or water and you get no more waves
in them. Sound actually travels more than four times faster through water
than air, because the water molecules that get banged into (vibrate) to
propagate the waves are packed more closely together. For this reason sound
travels faster in hot (vibrating) air more quickly than in cold air with its
more slowly vibrating molecules. Simple.
Lightis made of photons that can travel through a vacuum, air,
water because photons are like little bullets of light that travel in waves…so
they are particles and waves together.Not
so simple.
Electrons
can travel through the air and the vacuum of outer space. Electrons travel in
waves calledelectromagnetic
waves…so they are particles and waves together…Light is considered and
electromagnetic wave, as are radio waves, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, x-rays, gamma-rays,
etc.
Since when acting as a mechanical object (a light photon smacking into atmosphere) an electromagnetic wave starts vibrating atoms (just like waves in water) these electromagnetic waves travel slower when they're not in a vacuum! In a vacuum they travel at the speed of light...because it is light. Light travels at the speed of light...in a vacuum...duh!
Light moves through a vacuum at 186,282 miles per second; through Earth's atmosphere it moves at 186,227 miles per second.
You'd think that since soundwaves travel faster in water, that electromagnetic waves would travel faster in air (than in a vacuum). You'd be wrong, as we've just read.
Mechanical waves (water, sound, bullets) are like clunking people's head's together. If the Three Stooges are standing close to each other and you slap Curly all three heads clunk together quickly, the farther apart the Stooges are standing the slower each clunk is. Water is closer together than air.
Electromagnetic waves behave more like waves when they hit solid things, the waves distort and slow down. Yep, it's weird.
Anyway, most stuff moves in waves. Most particles show a dual wave/particle nature: electrons, photons and even some (by comparison) HUGE molecules will flow through a Young's Double Slit Experiment will show light going through two slits in a metal plate: it will come out as a wave on the other side...but if it's a photon particle how is it a wave? Even a single electron fired through one of the slits will go through and impact a screen behind the plate...if you fire electrons (or just about anything else) through the slit one after the other they make a wave-shaped pattern on the screen! Single particles move with the probability of a wave.
Single food particles ended up on MY side of the screen. Yum!
