Thursday, December 07, 2006

Do your balls cubes hang low?

Over the course of last year I was doing a rather cool experiment in YU for an Experimental Physics course. I built a macroscopic tool for one-dimensional phonon simulation. This involved hanging lots of (23) steel cubes (in prototypes they were balls) from long strings, vibrating them at different frequencies, and then measuring the amplitude and phase of the vibration of the final block.
I will be presenting the results of this experiment (in the form of a poster) at the PASI conference that I'll be attending next week in Argentina.

You can download a (113kb) PDF of this poster here [pdf], if you want to be able to actually read what's there.

Also, check out this writeup on the conference from YU's webpage [link].

4 comments:

  1. You know Avi wasn't all that far off with the action-reaction toy thing.

    But how did you quantize the frequencies?

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  2. I'm not sure what you mean by "quantize the frequencies". I used a digital signal generator to output the freqs, then scanned through a range.

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  3. Yeah, that would make sense. Unfortunately the PDF cut off about half of the poster at the margins, so it is hard to see what you were doing.

    So you scanned through a range of frequcies, in order to seach for the natural frequencies, measuring the amplitude and phase, or something else. As I said half the PDF is cut off, which makes it hard to see what is being graphed.

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  4. Try adjusting the zoom on the PDF? The whole poster should be there.

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