SCOPE

Materials Team 2004/5

Panos Oikonomou, Brent Sackris, Brenda Lopez Silva

Coach: Debby Mir

Part of the Water on the Move Exhibition

• What happens when our faucet drips?

• As a drop starts falling from the faucet a drop forms. The long neck of liquid behind it. The most interesting part is close to the pinch-off point: It gets narrower faster and faster.

• When the drop breaks up it assumes the familiar spherical shape.

• The exhibit is meant to capture the droplets both during the break-up process and when they fall!

Stroboscope

Speaker

Collect Water

Connect to Water Supply

Panel

Controls

Overview:

Visitors capture a water droplet as it forms. The strobe light seems to freeze the drops while they break-up and while they fall.

Visitors could have control over the frequency of the strobe. Depending on the strobe frequency the drops can be seen moving downwards, upwards or floating at a fixed point.

This setup has been designed by Sid Nagel’s group.

Evaluation Input:

• Looks unfamiliar but intriguing: Water can be interesting, it’s not just the liquid sitting in a glass

• Positive about message

• The way the strobe works needs to be explained.

The real thing…

The Strobe Effect: A flashy way for scientific observation

• The strobe has bigger frequency: It appears to rotate backwards

• The strobe has smaller frequency: I appears to move slowly forward.

This could be illustrated in some way on the side of the main exhibit, e.g. using a screen showing a runner on a tread mill instead of a rotating wheel.

• The light flashes at the same rate as the wheel rotates: the marked spot appears stationary. 

Pictures from MIT Edgerton web site

Let’s take a wheel that rotates clockwise at fixed rate.

Panel B:

• Visual explanation of strobe

• Pictures, video audio of drops in nature

Panel A:

• Signage Text

• Slow motion videos

Turn the knob! Make the light flash faster or slower. Can stop the image of the drop?

Try stopping and starting again. Don’t the drops break up the same way every time?

Label?

Fits both Sci-Tech’s other Strobe Exhibits and a general exhibition about the properties of water

Connects to MRSEC: Illustrates original science done by many people in MRSEC (Sid Nagel’s group in Physics Department of the UoC)

Budget and feasibility?

Focus:

• Interesting scientific facts: drop break up

• Methods of observation / scientific inquiry

FIN

Watch the drop as it starts falling! A big drop breaks. It forms a long tail behind it, but many smaller ones follow!

All the drops are round! What holds the water in the drop together? Water molecules stick together because they attract each other. This is called surface tension.

Label II