Rocking Aerodynamics Text

I said I would be back soon. This text provided by the US Navy totally rocks.

https://www.netc.navy.mil/nascweb/api/NAVAVSCOLSCOM-SG-111.pdf

Just got my wonderful wind tunnel in from Pitsco, the X-stream wind tunnel. It has a probe that measures how much drag force is experienced by objects in the tunnel. The wind speed measurement uses the fact that there is a Venturi tube shape in the tunnel itself. As a result, you can get the volumetric flow rate in the wind tunnel from the difference in pressure between the wide mouth and the narrow test area. It uses a manometer that is marked off in thousands of inches/minute. I am now gleefully gathering labs and lectures for the Aerodynamics course from MIT's lecture series. More later.

Making a Difference

Well, trying to make progress at my school on two fronts. We got a grant to buy some National Instrument LabView packages. The grant is providing funds for my training. It is exciting because this will bring us up to the 21 st century in techniques used in top of the line engineering programs, industry and even the military. This package can be used to program and take data, so my students will be in hog heaven.
In addition to this the wind tunnel comes on Monday. This can be used in Mechanical engineering, AP Physics, Honors Physics and Aerodynamics. Students have been asking for this course for a long time, so it should be well received also. This will supply me with what the Japanese call "The reason to get up in the morning" for at least five more years.

From tradgedy, a learning opportunity.

The Gulf Coast beaches are my favorite places in the Universe, especially in the off season when the beaches are mostly deserted and in November migrating butterflies fill the air. The seafood is great, and is a big part of the economy. When working with the Army Corp of Engineers, I got to see The Apalachicola river basin. It is a unique environment that owes it's purity to limestone aquifers and several fresh water clams that exist no where else to filter impurities from the water. This results in great oyster beds and shrimp hatcheries that provide 2/3 of American sea food.

Well all of that is pretty much toast. I find it odd that it occurred to me and other science teachers that we should be collecting water samples as the crap from the ongoing spill to teach students. Even disasters have something to show us.

The Grind

The Japanese call it the reason to get up in the morning. It can't be about just getting a pay check, or life becomes increasingly grinding and ugly. I like teaching my students about how cool the universe is. I am starting a new course on compressible aerodynamics based on the NASA web pages. I am using a wind tunnel from Pitsco along with their data acquisition software.

A great day teaching.

Taught my students about the velocity selector in AP Physics, where the electric force is balance out by the magnetic force. It is a thing of beauty. Get two parallel metal plate and put a big battery across it, you have instant E-field. Put a magnetic field perpendicular to it. If charged particle goes to fast, magnetic field curves it's path. If it is too slow, electric field curves it the opposite direction. If the speed is just right, v=E/B, it goes through undeflected.
We then talked about the path of the particle once it left this region and went into a magnetic field. It has a constant velocity. As a result, R=mv/qB (R=radius, m=mass, q=charge, B = magnetic field), the only variable being the mass. Different masses mean different radii. You could use this device to find out what isotope by percent were in a sample. Or it could be used to separate U235 from U238.
The Goodyear plant in Chilocothe, OH used this method to enrich uranium. It seems that everyone want's to use centrafuges today.
In robotics I got my students to program their robots to make a perfect square, until they ran into an obstacle. The used infrared leds to modulate a signal. If the modulated reflected signal were picked up, an obstacle was detected. The program would go into an avoidance subroutine, after which it would go back to making a square.

Free Textbooks

Teaching may be a lauded goal for society, but like infrastructure, our society doesn't give many of it's resoureces to it. As a result texts are hard to come by. Especially iratating is the text book racket that follows the texas school board mafia. The government has textbooks it hand out for free. I love them because it assumes the readers know nothing and "floats all boats" as it were. One of my new favorites is the Department of Energy offerings. www.hss.energy.gov/nuclearsafety/ns/techstds/standard/standard.html
They offer physics, electrical science, thermodynamics, mathematics, chemistry, material science, mechanics, the list is endless. I am using the nuclear reactor technology text for my nuclear engineering course.
Another interesting free text source is the Navy online technical manual directory at www.hnsa.org/doc/

Life is good an the good things in life are free. Not only that, they are usually on pdf files.

Joys of being a mad scientist.

Had a great time today. Cleaned out the physics store room. Garvin, my colleague wanted to get the stuff he used for his research out. It included a high power laser, two 50,000 V capacitors used to pulse the laser, power supply for the laser, and a $30,000.00 storage oscilloscope. I asked if I could have them and said yes. Bwa Ha Ha Ha!(mad scientist laugh)
I taught my students about macroscopic cross section and the neutron attenuation formula. It's a simple exponential decay, a formula that seems to be used over and over again. We derived Reactor power given a U235 fuel, reactor volume and neutron flux. I'm going to give them homework on the stuff and start the six factor formula for neutron number for each neutron generation.
In AP Physics we had a lab were they learned to properly use a volt and ammeter. Only had two people blow the meter fuse by hooking it up parallel to the resistor as opposed to be in series with it.
Life is good.

Teaching Nuclear Physics

I had a good day in Nuclear Physics today. I taught about the mass absorption coefficient and radiation shielding. I learned that it not only varies from material to material, but also the energy of the gamma rays involved. The constant we were comparing it with was for the gamma decay of a Barium isotope. We were using cobalt 60 which has two gammas at vastly different and higher energies. The half thickness needed for the Barium isotope was 6cm. The half thickness for cobalt 60 was nearly 12 cm. It is cool when experiments teach the teacher something new. I am working on the Nuclear Physics Lecture for tomorrow. I am using a free textbook. Google DOE-HDBK-1019/1-93 to get a look at it. It is for teaching nuclear technicians, and fits well within the high school level. It covers some obscure AP physics topics.
We will be starting work on the big Barbie Jeeps in Thursday's Robotics Lab. I will initiate my guys into the mysteries of dc brushless motors , gear boxes and motor performance curves. There is a lot of engineering stuff that normal high school students don't normally get to look at. I love it when the drive of students to make something leads them to go beyond the normal high school envelope.

Sometimes, the truth does not set you free.

I remember growing up, my favorite game as a child was "war". We would spend hours on end shooting each other with toy guns. My favorite tv show was "Combat", a world war two themed show. When I was a teen, we had the news on at the supper table. We would discuss the news at each supper. We saw the Vietnam War and over the course of decades we concluded that it was bad for us as a country and we should get out. Now mom and dad where as Republican as the day was long. Exposure to reality had Dad turning on his headlights on war moratorium day. Now we have embedded journalists and don't see the war or it's effects. Then comes wiki leaks. We watched copter jocks massacre journalists and act like they were ringing up points in a video game.
Now we have combat video of an up close and personal massacre in an Afghan village. Truth hurts. At least I hope it does enough to wake people up.

Thankfulness.

I love my life, my wife and children. I love the Gulf coast and the attitude of people here to relax and enjoy life. I love my family and the God they have taught me to love. I love creating things, even though I am a klutz and have at best what could be called improvised results. My old Physics teacher in high school said, "He has it up hear (pointing to the head) but here( waving his hands) Un uh. You call him over if you want to break something." Lately I have taken joy in creating food for my family, which none of them like, or will eat. I make my own wine, which my son likes as do I. Couldn't share with my nephews, since shipping it apparently violates a constitutional amendment.
I actually make robots, not just read books about it. I have one that my students and I took to MIT as an Inventeam. I am finally getting involved in First Robotics, now that I am convinced it is worthwhile.