Copasetic Flow

Lab Book 2014_05_20     Hamilton Carter Summary The fiberglass Dewar vacuum held.  The vacuum inlet was plugged to prevent any possible leaks there, and it was stored.  A 480 V three phase outlet for the magnet power supply was located. 4:30 AM Liquid Nitrogen Trap Refilling Refilled the liquid nitrogen trap that prevents oil vapor from the diffusion pump from migrating opposite the intended vacuum flow into the Dewar’s vacuum jacket.  The liquid nitrogen condenses the oil vapor in the bottom of the small container, (the trap), that it cools. The trap took two and a half cups of liquid nitrogen to refill.  The vacuum and leak detector readings before and after the fill are shown below. There was no noticeable improvement in the vacuum and leak readings before and after the Dewar refill.  This makes sense because the Dewar still had liquid nitrogen and was performing its intended function. Vacuum and leak readings...

Lab Book 2014_05_19     Hamilton Carter Summary Started work on leak checking a second fiberglass Dewar.  So far, the jacket seems to be holding vacuum well.  The auxiliary roughing pump was pumping more vapor into the system than expected.  Once it was taken out of the circuit, the diffusion pump quickly pulled the jacket back down to a reasonably good vacuum.  No leaks were detected in any of the vacuum junctions, or anywhere on the jacket. Testing a different fiberglass Dewar.  I wire brushed the old Teflon tape off the vacuum port and and attached the lead detector after putting on new Teflon tape. Just pumping the hose up to the Dewar, it looked like there might be a leak.  When the rouging pump was taken out of the system after a minute or two, the pressure went back up from about .05 to above .1 rather quickly.  However, after letting the roughing pump work for 28 minutes, when the valve was closed removing the ro...

Lab Book 2014_05_16     Hamilton Carter Summary There's a minor setback.  The fiberglass Dewar has a leak.  On the theory side of things, the relativistic range equation is shown to be proper x velocity times the rapidity of the y component of velocity divided by the acceleration due to gravity which is about what you'd expect it to look like if you first looked at the classical result and then squinted.  Work is being done to determine what, if anything, to make of the result.  Notes and a brief Mathematica file are included. Leak testing the fiberglass Dewar today.  I’m also looking through the second Tehran paper . There is a leak at the Teflon joint that is away from the Dewar.  It’s a rather small leak that can’t be detected using the roughing pump gauge. I've very slightly opened the Dewar valve and begun pumping on the large volume.  After about five minutes, the vacuum was back down to 3 * 10^-1. ...

Lab Book 2014_05_15     Hamilton Carter Summary Almost the entire day was spent finally actually using the leak detector!  The new stopcock was attached to the glass helium Dewar early this morning.  After that, I attended a theory meeting.  After cleaning and vacuum greasing a few fittings we found out that the glass liquid helium Dewar is leak tight!!!  The next step, glass Dewar-wise, will be to modify the table that it sits in so that it can be placed between the poles of the electromagnet.   I did some more thinking about the relativistic trajectory problem and found some possilbe symmetries in Shahin's expression for the y vs. x.  Both the expressions for hang time and the maximum range equations are interesting. Hang time is interesting because it's actually the same for the relativistic and classical cases.  Range is interesting because the expression involves the vertical component of the projectiles rapidity. ...

The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe received a pledge of help from Elon Musk of Tesla Motors fame this week!  The effort begun years ago by the Friends of Science East has inexhaustively progressed year by year to their ultimate goal of turning Nikola Tesla's last laboratory into a bustling science museum and maker space.  You might remember the famous ham radio efforts of folks like myself and a few G+ arteiests like  +Diana Eng  and  +Dashiell Hammutt  a few years ago to put the museum effort on the map, so to speak, by transmitting for the first time in over a century from Wardenclyffe and the New Yorker, (Tesla's last home). Soon after that followed the famous crowd-funding efforts of the Oatmeal's  +Matthew Inman  put the Tesla Science Center funding over the top and the Wardenclyffe site was purchased, and repairs began in earnest.  The site looks great now, but they need more funding to complete the cleanup and build the mus...

Lab Book 2014_05_14     Hamilton Carter Summary Tested the larger of the two YBCO superconductors by trying out three different levitation demonstrations.  Ran into a hitch when preparing to vacuum test the glass Dewar.  The glass stopcock valve to the vacuum jacket is stuck shut!  Unbeknownst to me, you can replace glass valves!  Did a bit of theory work looking at hyperbolic trajectories of relativistic particles and how they compare to the trajectories of projectiles with air resistance. Lab Work:  YBCO Rough Characterization The YBCO superconductor was levitation tested.  Although it’s not a quantitative measure, it seems to be levitating magnets as well as it ever did.  I ran a series of three demonstrations showing the different types of field cooling/levitation.  In the first experiment, the superconductor was cooled without the magnet present.  Since the sample was very well constructed using a crystal me...

Lab Book 2014_05_13     Hamilton Carter                Summary After fixing the crusty battery cable in the car this morning, I got to do a little bit of work around the lab before the end of the day.  We met and discussed the special relativity work today as well.  Fermi-Walker transport makes sense as just being the acceleration normal to the tangential velocity that changes the direction of the tangential velocity. The hose between the auxiliary roughing pump and the leak detector was attached.  The auxiliary pump is used to rough out the volum to be leak detected before using a valve on the leak detector to attach the built in diffusion pump to the volume to attain a much higher vacuum, (in the range of 10E-8 Torrs). The added hose used the fittings I built a few weeks ago to attach the system.  There’s an intermediate piece that contains an O-ring that fits between the KF fitting on the hose...