JD-Wordpress February 24th, 2007
Meeting notes contributed by Jim Emery
STEM squared notes. The meeting of February 21 was held up, levitated so to speak, by buoyant conversation, in the spirit of Archimedes. The Trailside Center, located beside both the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, with walls decorated with beautiful artwork, where 30 feet to the side of the main room, lay a bank vault visible from the main room, the walls again full with art, depicting historical scenes related to the Battle of Westport. The great Italian artist Asterio Pascolini (http://rendezvousstyle.com/artists/pascolini/pascolini.shtml), a retired Hallmark man, who is the one who created much of this art work, made an appearance, late, and presented a video on the Smart Board, of the crazy traffic of Florence, with speeding motorcycles, cars, buses, bicycles, and runners, avoiding fatal collisions by an eyelash. This all recorded viewed from some elevated position. When a recognizable scene from Florence appeared, these world travelers, commented, and spun anecdotes about when they were in Florence and when they viewed these places. This meeting was not quite as heavily attended as our last meeting, apparently many people, being hung over from the previous nights Mardi Gras (Tuesday Fat) celebration. Present in approximate order of appearance, were Bob Kessler, Bob Williams, Maurice Smith, Charley Mentesana, Scot Yerganian, Jim Emery, Leon Dixon, and Steve Brooks. None were wearing strings of Mardi Gras Beads. Several did not make the meeting because they were out of town, or had guests to entertain. Mark Pressly was the most out of town, being in New Zealand, working on some big deal. Again at this meeting, Amir Bagatelle did not appear, but no one seemed to give it much significance. Toward the middle of the meeting, Descartes made a spiritual appearance. Maurice talked to him about the fact that they both had spent time in the Boy Scouts. Maurice asked Descartes, “What were your thoughts, when you were tying a sheepshank.” Descartes answered, “I think knot,” and then disappeared. Charley Mentesana gave a demonstration of his experimental Sondhaus tube. This is, a closed metal tube, with electrical heating bands, and a glass partial barrier. In this device the heating bands heat the air and cause a pressure, which because of the barrier, produce a rather sharp pressure gradient. Charley worked on this in graduate school. Charley threw the switch, and squirted a little water into the end of the tube as stimulation. It gave out a long sustained moan, the heat energy being converted into audio energy. Charley gave an explanation, and drew some diagrams on the Smart Board. This generated much comment about feedback, energy conversion, pressures in organ pipes, and an interesting tutorial by Maurice Smith on the construction and properties of organ pipes. “To organize,” is to literally lay out your pipes on the floor in order. There is some current research, on an environmentally friendly energy-converting device based on the Sondhaus tube, sponsored by Ben and Jerry ice cream Company. Lord Rayleigh first discussed the Sondhaus tube in the nineteenth century. If audio energy created by crowd applause could be used to power a Sondhaus refrigerator, then perhaps theaters would not only be entertaining, but also very cool. Charley has a contract to work with Scot Yerganian on one of Scot’s piezo electric devices at Honeywell. Maurice talked about his pending trip to Antarctica and a global warming experiment. With the permission of the ships captain, which has been granted, he will suspend a temperature-measuring device from a line into the water and so will chart the sea temperature, on the way to Antarctica. Garmin is willing to contribute an accurate GPS device to determine the location of the measurements. Maurice asks us for suggestions on how to compensate for depth and how to improve accuracy. Maurice also showed some interesting maps of Antarctica, and showed us the granite cubit that he has had made. Steve Brooks has a forearm, where the distance from elbow to fingertips matched the cubit. Most of us fell short. This cubit has hieroglyphics carved and colored by Kansas City sculptor S_______, her web site is blah blah. A future project is to carve an accurate copy of the Rosetta stone from a digital image of a rubbing made by the Napoleon expedition to Egypt. The Napoleon scientific expedition to Egypt is the subject of a current display at the Linda Hall library. I did not get to my presentation on Relativity theory. Bob Kessler had a presentation on some books, one book was the C.P. Snow book, “The Two Cultures,” which Bob believes is quite relevant to current Kansas City politics. There are some free 2D CAD programs that may be downloaded. One is called free2Design and is being used extensively by the Chinese. The website for free2Design uses Joomla, like our website. Another one is from Unigraphics, called “Solid Edge 2d Drafting.” These companies want to sell their 3d packages. We talked some, about our web site. For those interested in word origins, there are copies of the old NPR programs made by the poet John Ciardi at the National Public Radio WEB site.
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Perhaps I should put these notes in our stem2 wiki. Then readers could access our site
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to make additions, or correct the lies.
A Sondhaus Reference:
Author: Alex Cargill
Published: October 1988
Page(s): 15
Article Type: Physics in Action
Full text (PDF, 2,364K)
Article Summary
Thermoacoustic phenomena, involving the generation of sound by fluctuating heat addition have been studied for over two centuries. They are most familiar in the form of such laboratory devices as the Sondhaus tube and the Rijke tube and in the destructive instabilities that can occur in combustion systems. Now, Albert Migliori and Greg Swift at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have put these phenomena to practical use in a novel thermoacoustic engine (Appl. Phys. Lett. 1988 53 355).