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who will have this first?


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Posted
Posted

Let's split it. I will do the lights at the top.
You get the fountain.

Posted

ItsMeBobO wrote:

Let's split it. I will do the lights at the top.
You get the fountain.

lol deal
Posted

I saw a fountain like this at CTIA conference maybe two years ago. I watched it for about an hour in amazement.

Posted

I saw a similar video of one somewhere in china one of those would be cool but to rich for my money

Posted

I cant find the link, but when I startned looking at adding water this past season, someplace http://laminar.forumotion.com a member had built his own.

much smaller, but he had software for the text that would convert everything into controll signals and turn on/off like 50 -100 valves with precision timing.

The whole thing was home-brew. verry cool.

Posted

Well that is cool. Pikadroo, I would imagine what ever terminal velocity is then it would all catch up and be back to normal. But air currents would make it atomize I would think. Great item for the bucket list, Jeff.

Posted

Jeff Millard wrote:

What do you think would happen in a vacuum Paul/Drew? Does it still stretch out like it appears to in the video? Like the spaghettification that happens to things that get too close to a black hole!?! (sorry lin...)

:cool:

Jeff


I know, you didn't ask me but I agree that air resistance is an issue but in a vacuum the water would just boil away/crystallize as energy is lost due to phase changes.

But perhaps if we could minimize the influence of the air by making the difference in mass less significant it would clear things up. So perhaps we do it in lower air pressure and use molten (spent) uranium instead of water. With the mass difference between the uranium and the sparse air the effects of the air will become much less pronounced.

Maybe a little more noise when the uranium hits the bottom of the fountain and maybe you would need to stand back a little farther when viewing it.
Posted

LightORamaDan wrote:

Jeff Millard wrote:
What do you think would happen in a vacuum Paul/Drew? Does it still stretch out like it appears to in the video? Like the spaghettification that happens to things that get too close to a black hole!?! (sorry lin...)

:cool:

Jeff


I know, you didn't ask me but I agree that air resistance is an issue but in a vacuum the water would just boil away/crystallize as energy is lost due to phase changes.

But perhaps if we could minimize the influence of the air by making the difference in mass less significant it would clear things up. So perhaps we do it in lower air pressure and use molten (spent) uranium instead of water. With the mass difference between the uranium and the sparse air the effects of the air will become much less pronounced.

Maybe a little more noise when the uranium hits the bottom of the fountain and maybe you would need to stand back a little farther when viewing it.
huh what?:P
Posted

james campbell wrote:

LightORamaDan wrote:
Jeff Millard wrote:
What do you think would happen in a vacuum Paul/Drew? Does it still stretch out like it appears to in the video? Like the spaghettification that happens to things that get too close to a black hole!?! (sorry lin...)

:cool:

Jeff


I know, you didn't ask me but I agree that air resistance is an issue but in a vacuum the water would just boil away/crystallize as energy is lost due to phase changes.

But perhaps if we could minimize the influence of the air by making the difference in mass less significant it would clear things up. So perhaps we do it in lower air pressure and use molten (spent) uranium instead of water. With the mass difference between the uranium and the sparse air the effects of the air will become much less pronounced.

Maybe a little more noise when the uranium hits the bottom of the fountain and maybe you would need to stand back a little farther when viewing it.
huh what?:D


James you are so right! Do I feel stupid. I was not taking the high surface tension of water into account. That DOES make a big difference. Have no idea what the surface tension of uranium is but it is not going to form the same "droplets".. Back to the drawing board.

Dan
Posted

LightORamaDan wrote:

james campbell wrote:
LightORamaDan wrote:
Jeff Millard wrote:
What do you think would happen in a vacuum Paul/Drew? Does it still stretch out like it appears to in the video? Like the spaghettification that happens to things that get too close to a black hole!?! (sorry lin...)

:cool:

Jeff


I know, you didn't ask me but I agree that air resistance is an issue but in a vacuum the water would just boil away/crystallize as energy is lost due to phase changes.

But perhaps if we could minimize the influence of the air by making the difference in mass less significant it would clear things up. So perhaps we do it in lower air pressure and use molten (spent) uranium instead of water. With the mass difference between the uranium and the sparse air the effects of the air will become much less pronounced.

Maybe a little more noise when the uranium hits the bottom of the fountain and maybe you would need to stand back a little farther when viewing it.
huh what?:D


James you are so right! Do I feel stupid. I was not taking the high surface tension of water into account. That DOES make a big difference. Have no idea what the surface tension of uranium is but it is not going to form the same "droplets".. Back to the drawing board.

Dan

now that is funny folks lol
Posted

ya, thats all fine. But what about gravity? I mean just cause it works here, does not mean it will work in the base on the moon. And dont tell me you dont know anything about the moon base.:shock:

Posted

LightORamaDan wrote:

Jeff Millard wrote:
What do you think would happen in a vacuum Paul/Drew? Does it still stretch out like it appears to in the video? Like the spaghettification that happens to things that get too close to a black hole!?! (sorry lin...)

:cool:

Jeff


I know, you didn't ask me but I agree that air resistance is an issue but in a vacuum the water would just boil away/crystallize as energy is lost due to phase changes.

But perhaps if we could minimize the influence of the air by making the difference in mass less significant it would clear things up. So perhaps we do it in lower air pressure and use molten (spent) uranium instead of water. With the mass difference between the uranium and the sparse air the effects of the air will become much less pronounced.

Maybe a little more noise when the uranium hits the bottom of the fountain and maybe you would need to stand back a little farther when viewing it.

You'd definitely need a heavily lead lined suit to view that fountain! Doubt you'd even be able to move in it, it would be so very extremely heavy to protect you from the radiation eminating from the Uranium! Especially since a fountain of that size and caliber would require a **LOT** of Uranium to make it work! Not to mention the cost of obtaining the Uranium, which would also be very unlikely.
Posted

Orville wrote:

LightORamaDan wrote:
Jeff Millard wrote:
What do you think would happen in a vacuum Paul/Drew? Does it still stretch out like it appears to in the video? Like the spaghettification that happens to things that get too close to a black hole!?! (sorry lin...)

:cool:

Jeff


I know, you didn't ask me but I agree that air resistance is an issue but in a vacuum the water would just boil away/crystallize as energy is lost due to phase changes.

But perhaps if we could minimize the influence of the air by making the difference in mass less significant it would clear things up. So perhaps we do it in lower air pressure and use molten (spent) uranium instead of water. With the mass difference between the uranium and the sparse air the effects of the air will become much less pronounced.

Maybe a little more noise when the uranium hits the bottom of the fountain and maybe you would need to stand back a little farther when viewing it.

You'd definitely need a heavily lead lined suit to view that fountain!  Doubt you'd even be able to move in it, it would be so very extremely heavy to protect you from the radiation eminating from the Uranium!   Especially since a fountain of that size and caliber would require a **LOT** of Uranium to make it work!   Not to mention the cost of obtaining the Uranium, which would also be very unlikely.


I mentioned "spent" uranium which is not very radioactive and there is a lot of it, Used heavily by the military to make bullets as their mass helps develop tremendous kinetic energy.

Okay so it isn't pratical. That hasn't stop a lot of things that have been developed: :D
Posted

Jeff Millard wrote:

Oh yeah, we're staying on topic here aren't we?
Jeff


Hi Jeff,

Will go back to your last post and give a more ontopic reply than I did last time. :D

Jeff Millard wrote:
What do you think would happen in a vacuum Paul/Drew? Does it still stretch out like it appears to in the video? Like the spaghettification that happens to things that get too close to a black hole!?! (sorry lin...)

:cool:

Jeff


I think the main issue with running the fountain in a vacuum will be that it is very difficult to maintain liquid water in a vacuum. The lack of air pressure will cause the liquid water to evaporate very rapidly and when that happens a lot of energy will be lost so you will get some gas and some ice but little if any liquid water. Perhaps as someone suggested there would be a way to inject a lot of energy to maintain the liquid but not sure how… While in college, I had an assistantship in a research lab for General Electric and as part of project I was assigned to, I used an electron microscope (it was fun!). As part of that system we had a very good vacuum chamber that could draw an almost perfect vacuum rather quickly. It was fun to put a glass of water in it to see what happened. My experience there, leads me to believe that it will be difficult to achieve liquid water in a vacuum..

In addition someone mentioned that it would “ball up” in a vacuum. I am not sure that would happen as I am not sure that the air surrounding the water makes too much difference BUT without gravity we certainly would see the water ball up as is often demonstrated by astronauts working in zero gravity.

And someone else mentioned that on the moon with reduced gravity and wondered would it work. That is interesting… I think that it would work but it would look much different. Because the acceleration due to gravity would be much lower, it would appear to be in slow motion as it fell, at least as compared to the demonstration at one gravity.

If we want to keep the vacuum paradigm then I think that we will need to go with a different liquid. One possibility is liquid metal which may be able to stay in the molten state in a vacuum so perhaps molten lead is a good choice as it is heavy and has a rather low melting point. There may be issues with the viscosity of the liquid but experiments could be worked out.

As far as the “stretching” effect (as near a black hole), well as we see in the demo things do stretch. That is of course due to the acceleration due to gravity and because the water at the “bottom” has been falling longer and is therefore moving faster causing things to distort. And yes, the air does have some influence and does reduce the acceleration. Thus if you could get the water to fall, without air present , there would be increased stretching. However the amount of increase would be rather small because the influence of the air resistance is related to the speed of the object. The faster it goes the more resistance afforded by the air thus falling objects eventually reach a terminal velocity where they stop accelerating. The water in the fountain does not fall long enough to be gain enough speed to be highly influenced by air resistance but yes even though it is small air resistance is a variable.

As far as comparing it to black hole, if we are far enough away then it may be similar but as we approach the event horizon I believe that some of the rules of physics get a little fuzzy (at least to me).

Dan
Posted

Making one of those fountains would not really be all that hard to do. (if you could find the parts and had the time and money)... You need a bunch of small water valves that can be opened/closed quickly. A pump that kept water in a trough at the top with a "float" regulator to keep the water from overflowing at the top. To get the pattern you turn the valves (channels) on for a certain period of time.

Not really much different than we do with our lights as far as programming is concerned. The longer you keep a channel on the longer the stream of water that comes out so if you took the sequence editor and turned it on edge you could draw the patterns into the channels.

Not sure how many channels they have there but it seems like a lot.

Dan

Posted

Jeff Millard wrote:

Yeah Giz said someone had done that before. I vaguely recall some links. That was around the first time I saw the link to the LOR controller for water valves. I had forgotten about that, but just recently there was a link posted to the manual for it. Is there a shelf somewhere in upstate New York with a series of production runs of things like that controller?

Jeff


The variable speed fountain pump card that we build would not work well for this. That card provides variable speed output for 3 AC pumps and has three DC output channels for RGB floods. That project was consigned by another company and we continue to wait on them to decide what they are going to do with it.

In the case of this fountain, I think the technology is actually much simpler. Some small solenoid valves some controllers and the software required to generate the patterns. I think the only thing missing here is the valves.

In addition there is the need for a regular fountain pump to move the water from the bottom basin to a top tank to feed the manifold with the valves and a switch (reverse of the type used on a sump pump) to regulate the amount of water in the top tank.

Dan
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