Monday
Events
Whew it’s been a LONG week.
Friday night Sharon and I were out and about doing some shopping and ended up eating some Chinese food. Mmmm.
Saturday I was up early, and changed the oil in both of my vehicles. I accidentally drove the van right over top of the ramps I use to jack up the vehicles. I ended up cutting two big gashes in them, but they still seem to work. The vehicles seem to be running better, however my truck’s check engine light came on this morning with an error code of a misfire happening. I think it might have been caused by the fuel injection cleaner I put into a half empty tank. I filled up the truck and reset the code so we’ll see.
Later Saturday on a whim, we drove to Ship Bottom, which is a beach. The night before Sharon’s fourtune cookie said that soon she would take a trip to the coast, so in that light we had to obey the cookie.
Ship Bottom is an interesting place. I used to vacation there as a boy. My parents would rent a house for a week with my aunts and uncles and we would bask along the Jersey shore, thinking that some how that gave us a break from the constant onslaught of deadly pollutants from the nearby industrial complex.
Much like everything else in New Jersey, this place is wrapped in folklore. I never really questioned where the name “Ship Bottom” came from but some casual reading I happened upon one day produced this:
“The captain of a schooner heading south was navigating through a thick fog when he heard cries from the direction of the shoreline. Encountering a schooner heading North, he alerted the Captain that there might be a ship in trouble near the shore. Although the Captain and his crew could see nothing in the fog, they rowed along the outer bar for several hours searching for the endangered ship. Finally a dark shape appeared - the hull of a ship overturned in the shoals. Corpses hung from the rigging and bobbed in the frigid sea. As one of the captains' men climbed onboard the beached schooner, he heard a noise under his feet, someone tapping the inside of the barnacled hull. With an ax, he chopped a hole in the ship's bottom near the keel and, with much struggle, freed the young woman trapped there. She spoke no English, but after being taken ashore, she expressed her gratitude by drawing a cross of thanks in the sand. No one knows her name or the name of the ship because they were never recorded, but the place of the shipwreck and the rescue became known as Ship Bottom".
Sunday Sharon and I went on ANOTHER hike. Basically it was the same trails but we pushed things a little further and wanted to see if we could venture into the trails of the next township over.
Another shot of the creek from Clay hill. Across the creek I noticed a small hill that I had wondered how it got there. Sharon then explained to me that it was the result of the lay of land surrounding it. Nope no Indian stuff would be there.
Rumor had it that there was a trail back along this way that used to be an Indian trail.
Sure enough, about a mile away from that location was a small rarely travel trail called “Indian Trail” We took it and then happened upon this little hill. Still not sure what this is all about. It is not near any homes, it is set back from the creek a bit, and it doesn’t appear to have any trees growing out of it or strange growth leading me to believe that it is not an ancient septic system. Hmmmm, I think next time I’ll bring my shovel.
Finally after we followed the Monongahela brook for a bit we walked under a bridge that led us to Deptford Township. A little ways into the wood and we found a paintball range.
Also I thought this was extremely strange all the rocks around there seemed to have copper in them.
Finally, Sharon showed me a gigantic aluminum pipe sticking out of a tree. I guess some drunk/horny paintballer decided to get it on. I might come back for that if I can ever get my little forge running;)
All in all it was an awesome hike, and we found still MORE trails beyond this point to check out next weekend.
Tinkering
Well there is too much to detail so I’ll just post the most recent entries from a little journal I keep on Solar Experiments.
01/31/2008 Mini Fresnel test and Assumptions
While rummaging around my desk here at work I happened upon a small Fresnel magnifier I picked up during my days working for Florida Hospital. I took it outside yesterday morning and immediately burned a hold in a leaf.
Because the lens is flimsy I decided to make a little test box for it using an old box for copier paper.
The lens is clearly mounted in one side of the box. Inside the box I marked out the inches away from the lens to get a decent measurement of where the focal point was.
Once I found that, I made a small board to mount testing instruments on. Here is an ancient thermocouple I had laying around in my garage.
A word on Thermocouples.
There are many different types in this world. The meter that I have boasts that it can read K-Type thermocouples. However every K-Type thermocouple I have never seems to register the correct temperature.
There are meter readings in millivolts when I place the thermocouple near a hot surface. I tried a MAP gas torch, boiling water and even my armpit and got a reading. I’m not sure if the thermocouples I have are just bad (in excess of 25 years old) or that the meter is just crazy.
Since it seems like the thermocouples are registering a temperature change, I might try and hook one up to my selective voltmeter that will allow me to read very small voltages. If I can get a decent, reoccurring register of some ice and boiling water then I can start to make a graph. Because thermocouples are non-linier I’ll need more then just two points of reference.
Aside from this little problem, I also need a way to compare my measurements with the calculated wattage of one square meter of sunlight. Below is my attempt to get some math into this whole mess.
Assumptions:
· One square meter of sunlight has 1000 potential watts to be harnessed.
· This means that for every 10,000 square centimeters there are 1,000 potential watts.
· This also means that each centimeter has a potential 0.1-Watts to be harnessed.
· My small Fresnel mounted in a box is 15 cm X 6 cm or 90 square centimeters. This amounts to 9 potential Watts at the focal point.
· My large Fresnel is 101.6 cm X 76.2 cm or 7,741.92 square centimeters. This amounts to 774.192 potential watts at the focal point.
Measurements:
· On the small Fresnel my flawed thermocouple measured about 1 millivolt in the time span of 1 minute.
· The flash point of paper is 451 degrees F. In half a minute paper was burning. The focal point must be more then 451 degrees at 30 seconds time.
01/31/2008 Calculations
Assuming I can work out a solution for getting decent reading for temperature I feel I can somewhat accurately tell how much wattage I am playing with.
The Fresnel design to harness solar energy will need to be put on hold for this experiment, and water heating will have to fill the void.
Because the medium we will be heating is water we can use readily available components to accomplish this. For instance we can use a meat thermometer. And we can base our calculations on the fact that 1 gram of “pure” water being displaced by 1 degree centigrade will be one calorie used. So
Calories = Temperature change (C) / Mass (gr) of water.
Calories can then be converted to Joules. 1 Calorie = 4.1868 Joules.
Watts = Joules / second
Then I can plug the amount of time a given mass of water is heated by so many degrees centigrade over a period of time into an online converter found here at Online Conversion - Watt Calculator.
This should give me the wattage.
I am still working out the design of the apparatus to use.
02/01/2008 Getting answers to questions.
Borrowed a meter from my Father that will read temperature. It would seem my meter was in error. His works much better and I was able to get correct readings from ice and hot water. I feel comfortable with the results of it. The manual states that the meter can read up to 750 Celsius so I think I might have a solution to getting my readings.
Also I submitted the following request for information on converting temperature read over time to Wattage, to get decent idea of how much I am working with.
Request:
Hello All,
I am new to this forum, and right up front I will say I know very little about physics in general. That does not however limit my ability to question and ask for help from people in the know.
Here is my dilemma. I have a small Fresnel lens approx. 6 cm X 15 cm. Or 90 square centimeters. I would like to know how much power in Watts this is really focusing.
I did a little math under the assumption of each square meter receiving 1000 Watts of solar energy on a sunny day at the equator and came up with about 9 watts of calculated power at the focal point.
This of course is a figure that assumes there is no loss in the system. So to get a better idea of how much power is REALLY at the focal point, I want to make some measurements.
I have a K-Type thermocouple hooked into a meter that can read up to 750 degrees Celsius with moderate accuracy. I’ll place the thermocouple at the focal point. The focal point appears to be about 1 cm in diameter. The diameter of the thermocouple is about half of that.
Is it possible (and if so can I have it explained to me), to calculate how much wattage is at the focal point, by taking a temperature reading over time?
Any help or explanation would be great.
Thanks
Reply
Your initial assumption is reasonable- 9 watts. For more accuracy, you need the right tools, and a thermocouple is not it.
Even so, you have the beginnings of an interesting experiment- the power will depend on the atmospheric conditions (air absorption), and since you have some tools, why not do the experiment and see what happens?
However, I would instead focus the light into a (known) volume of water into which the thermocouple is inserted, rather than directly onto the thermocouple. That will give you better stability and accuracy.
02/03/2008 Well I tried it anyway
Despite the suggestions of the person who replied to my request for info, I went ahead and tried the experiment using only a thermocouple at the focal point.
Using the same experimental apparatus to focus light to a point, I properly aligned things to point directly at the sun without having to worry about things being jostled around.
I also added a few extras o this go around, to help ensure a bit more safety and accuracy. Chipper’s goggles to help save my eyes, a better meter that can accurately record temperature, and a piece of wood to record temperatures over time with. (No paper was available).
As can be seen here it did not take too much adjusting to get the focal point centered on the thermocouple. I recorded a 5-minute session of the rise in temperature.
AS you can see there is a steady raise in temperature over the 5-minute period, and almost a leveling out at around three minutes. The small fluctuation at four minutes thirty seconds was due to a small cloud passing by. The problem I have with this data is best described in the picture below.
This is a hole burned into the test pad when I removed the thermocouple. When the thermocouple was in place the highest reading I got was 53 degrees C. But it takes at least 232 degrees C to burn through paper. This leads me to believe two things.
1. The thermocouple is being heated unevenly since only the focal point is applying heat. The other 80% of the thermocouple is merely radiating what the focal point is applying.
2. Thermocouples are better used to measure slow changed in temperatures over time, not hundreds of degrees in mere seconds.
If I’ve learned nothing else, I have learned that the outlined method using the temperature change in a given amount of water is the best method to measure the amount of power I am dealing with.
It’s enough to drive a person crazy.
Reading
Read more of Broca’s Brain. ALMOST done.
Health
Ate terribly over the weekend and only hiked about eight miles total over the weekend.
Monday 6.85 Miles
Tuesday 7.57 Miles
Wednesday 3.86 Miles
Thursday 5.72 Miles
Friday 2.04 Miles
Saturday 4.75 Miles
Sunday 10.09 Miles
Dream
Had a very odd dream the other night.
Apparently I was a reporter of some sort. And in front of me lay a gigantic ten-story iron works plant. In it all the workers were of Mexican origin. There were large trains of people stacked on cars like they do in India going into and out of the plant to swap out workers for the day.
Also inside the building laid a gigantic atrium, a ten-story atrium surround by building. Along each floor I could see onlookers looking out into the atrium. Then I noticed a phantom floating about inside the atrium. It was huge. The face it had was of an old man, almost like the Freeze miser from that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer specials. His body was skinny and emaciated, and the lack of legs and tattered rags that are so adorning of a phantom was none other then the American flag.
Here this thing floated in misery in its prison of this grand industry that it was once lord of.
Then a buzzer sounded and I heard a train starting to move. A door opened up and a it started to come out of the building. There were flatbed cars covered with migrant workers. They all had instruments and appeared to be standing on a stage. Then they all started singing “Farwell Ride” by Beck. It was creepy.
I shook my head and started to walk down a roadway. The road was made of cobblestone and there were horse and carriages coming to and fro. Most of the carriages were empty. It was like the horses were on some predetermined route and were able to operate by themselves.
Some of the carriages had fat people in them. All the carriages that were occupied had a mask hanging off the back of them. They were the types of masks that were used in old theater presentations. Either laughing or crying. Most of them were crying.
I then walked up to a house with a fat man in the front yard. He way dressed nicely and was scurrying about. He had asked for my help and I realized he was building a small stone circle so he could play marbles.
Then I woke up, weird.
Weather
39 degrees outside and it’s starting to cloud up for some rain coming.
Whew it’s been a LONG week.
Friday night Sharon and I were out and about doing some shopping and ended up eating some Chinese food. Mmmm.
Saturday I was up early, and changed the oil in both of my vehicles. I accidentally drove the van right over top of the ramps I use to jack up the vehicles. I ended up cutting two big gashes in them, but they still seem to work. The vehicles seem to be running better, however my truck’s check engine light came on this morning with an error code of a misfire happening. I think it might have been caused by the fuel injection cleaner I put into a half empty tank. I filled up the truck and reset the code so we’ll see.
Later Saturday on a whim, we drove to Ship Bottom, which is a beach. The night before Sharon’s fourtune cookie said that soon she would take a trip to the coast, so in that light we had to obey the cookie.
Ship Bottom is an interesting place. I used to vacation there as a boy. My parents would rent a house for a week with my aunts and uncles and we would bask along the Jersey shore, thinking that some how that gave us a break from the constant onslaught of deadly pollutants from the nearby industrial complex.
Much like everything else in New Jersey, this place is wrapped in folklore. I never really questioned where the name “Ship Bottom” came from but some casual reading I happened upon one day produced this:
“The captain of a schooner heading south was navigating through a thick fog when he heard cries from the direction of the shoreline. Encountering a schooner heading North, he alerted the Captain that there might be a ship in trouble near the shore. Although the Captain and his crew could see nothing in the fog, they rowed along the outer bar for several hours searching for the endangered ship. Finally a dark shape appeared - the hull of a ship overturned in the shoals. Corpses hung from the rigging and bobbed in the frigid sea. As one of the captains' men climbed onboard the beached schooner, he heard a noise under his feet, someone tapping the inside of the barnacled hull. With an ax, he chopped a hole in the ship's bottom near the keel and, with much struggle, freed the young woman trapped there. She spoke no English, but after being taken ashore, she expressed her gratitude by drawing a cross of thanks in the sand. No one knows her name or the name of the ship because they were never recorded, but the place of the shipwreck and the rescue became known as Ship Bottom".
Sunday Sharon and I went on ANOTHER hike. Basically it was the same trails but we pushed things a little further and wanted to see if we could venture into the trails of the next township over.
Another shot of the creek from Clay hill. Across the creek I noticed a small hill that I had wondered how it got there. Sharon then explained to me that it was the result of the lay of land surrounding it. Nope no Indian stuff would be there.
Rumor had it that there was a trail back along this way that used to be an Indian trail.
Sure enough, about a mile away from that location was a small rarely travel trail called “Indian Trail” We took it and then happened upon this little hill. Still not sure what this is all about. It is not near any homes, it is set back from the creek a bit, and it doesn’t appear to have any trees growing out of it or strange growth leading me to believe that it is not an ancient septic system. Hmmmm, I think next time I’ll bring my shovel.
Finally after we followed the Monongahela brook for a bit we walked under a bridge that led us to Deptford Township. A little ways into the wood and we found a paintball range.
Also I thought this was extremely strange all the rocks around there seemed to have copper in them.
Finally, Sharon showed me a gigantic aluminum pipe sticking out of a tree. I guess some drunk/horny paintballer decided to get it on. I might come back for that if I can ever get my little forge running;)
All in all it was an awesome hike, and we found still MORE trails beyond this point to check out next weekend.
Tinkering
Well there is too much to detail so I’ll just post the most recent entries from a little journal I keep on Solar Experiments.
01/31/2008 Mini Fresnel test and Assumptions
While rummaging around my desk here at work I happened upon a small Fresnel magnifier I picked up during my days working for Florida Hospital. I took it outside yesterday morning and immediately burned a hold in a leaf.
Because the lens is flimsy I decided to make a little test box for it using an old box for copier paper.
The lens is clearly mounted in one side of the box. Inside the box I marked out the inches away from the lens to get a decent measurement of where the focal point was.
Once I found that, I made a small board to mount testing instruments on. Here is an ancient thermocouple I had laying around in my garage.
A word on Thermocouples.
There are many different types in this world. The meter that I have boasts that it can read K-Type thermocouples. However every K-Type thermocouple I have never seems to register the correct temperature.
There are meter readings in millivolts when I place the thermocouple near a hot surface. I tried a MAP gas torch, boiling water and even my armpit and got a reading. I’m not sure if the thermocouples I have are just bad (in excess of 25 years old) or that the meter is just crazy.
Since it seems like the thermocouples are registering a temperature change, I might try and hook one up to my selective voltmeter that will allow me to read very small voltages. If I can get a decent, reoccurring register of some ice and boiling water then I can start to make a graph. Because thermocouples are non-linier I’ll need more then just two points of reference.
Aside from this little problem, I also need a way to compare my measurements with the calculated wattage of one square meter of sunlight. Below is my attempt to get some math into this whole mess.
Assumptions:
· One square meter of sunlight has 1000 potential watts to be harnessed.
· This means that for every 10,000 square centimeters there are 1,000 potential watts.
· This also means that each centimeter has a potential 0.1-Watts to be harnessed.
· My small Fresnel mounted in a box is 15 cm X 6 cm or 90 square centimeters. This amounts to 9 potential Watts at the focal point.
· My large Fresnel is 101.6 cm X 76.2 cm or 7,741.92 square centimeters. This amounts to 774.192 potential watts at the focal point.
Measurements:
· On the small Fresnel my flawed thermocouple measured about 1 millivolt in the time span of 1 minute.
· The flash point of paper is 451 degrees F. In half a minute paper was burning. The focal point must be more then 451 degrees at 30 seconds time.
01/31/2008 Calculations
Assuming I can work out a solution for getting decent reading for temperature I feel I can somewhat accurately tell how much wattage I am playing with.
The Fresnel design to harness solar energy will need to be put on hold for this experiment, and water heating will have to fill the void.
Because the medium we will be heating is water we can use readily available components to accomplish this. For instance we can use a meat thermometer. And we can base our calculations on the fact that 1 gram of “pure” water being displaced by 1 degree centigrade will be one calorie used. So
Calories = Temperature change (C) / Mass (gr) of water.
Calories can then be converted to Joules. 1 Calorie = 4.1868 Joules.
Watts = Joules / second
Then I can plug the amount of time a given mass of water is heated by so many degrees centigrade over a period of time into an online converter found here at Online Conversion - Watt Calculator.
This should give me the wattage.
I am still working out the design of the apparatus to use.
02/01/2008 Getting answers to questions.
Borrowed a meter from my Father that will read temperature. It would seem my meter was in error. His works much better and I was able to get correct readings from ice and hot water. I feel comfortable with the results of it. The manual states that the meter can read up to 750 Celsius so I think I might have a solution to getting my readings.
Also I submitted the following request for information on converting temperature read over time to Wattage, to get decent idea of how much I am working with.
Request:
Hello All,
I am new to this forum, and right up front I will say I know very little about physics in general. That does not however limit my ability to question and ask for help from people in the know.
Here is my dilemma. I have a small Fresnel lens approx. 6 cm X 15 cm. Or 90 square centimeters. I would like to know how much power in Watts this is really focusing.
I did a little math under the assumption of each square meter receiving 1000 Watts of solar energy on a sunny day at the equator and came up with about 9 watts of calculated power at the focal point.
This of course is a figure that assumes there is no loss in the system. So to get a better idea of how much power is REALLY at the focal point, I want to make some measurements.
I have a K-Type thermocouple hooked into a meter that can read up to 750 degrees Celsius with moderate accuracy. I’ll place the thermocouple at the focal point. The focal point appears to be about 1 cm in diameter. The diameter of the thermocouple is about half of that.
Is it possible (and if so can I have it explained to me), to calculate how much wattage is at the focal point, by taking a temperature reading over time?
Any help or explanation would be great.
Thanks
Reply
Your initial assumption is reasonable- 9 watts. For more accuracy, you need the right tools, and a thermocouple is not it.
Even so, you have the beginnings of an interesting experiment- the power will depend on the atmospheric conditions (air absorption), and since you have some tools, why not do the experiment and see what happens?
However, I would instead focus the light into a (known) volume of water into which the thermocouple is inserted, rather than directly onto the thermocouple. That will give you better stability and accuracy.
02/03/2008 Well I tried it anyway
Despite the suggestions of the person who replied to my request for info, I went ahead and tried the experiment using only a thermocouple at the focal point.
Using the same experimental apparatus to focus light to a point, I properly aligned things to point directly at the sun without having to worry about things being jostled around.
I also added a few extras o this go around, to help ensure a bit more safety and accuracy. Chipper’s goggles to help save my eyes, a better meter that can accurately record temperature, and a piece of wood to record temperatures over time with. (No paper was available).
As can be seen here it did not take too much adjusting to get the focal point centered on the thermocouple. I recorded a 5-minute session of the rise in temperature.
AS you can see there is a steady raise in temperature over the 5-minute period, and almost a leveling out at around three minutes. The small fluctuation at four minutes thirty seconds was due to a small cloud passing by. The problem I have with this data is best described in the picture below.
This is a hole burned into the test pad when I removed the thermocouple. When the thermocouple was in place the highest reading I got was 53 degrees C. But it takes at least 232 degrees C to burn through paper. This leads me to believe two things.
1. The thermocouple is being heated unevenly since only the focal point is applying heat. The other 80% of the thermocouple is merely radiating what the focal point is applying.
2. Thermocouples are better used to measure slow changed in temperatures over time, not hundreds of degrees in mere seconds.
If I’ve learned nothing else, I have learned that the outlined method using the temperature change in a given amount of water is the best method to measure the amount of power I am dealing with.
It’s enough to drive a person crazy.
Reading
Read more of Broca’s Brain. ALMOST done.
Health
Ate terribly over the weekend and only hiked about eight miles total over the weekend.
Monday 6.85 Miles
Tuesday 7.57 Miles
Wednesday 3.86 Miles
Thursday 5.72 Miles
Friday 2.04 Miles
Saturday 4.75 Miles
Sunday 10.09 Miles
Dream
Had a very odd dream the other night.
Apparently I was a reporter of some sort. And in front of me lay a gigantic ten-story iron works plant. In it all the workers were of Mexican origin. There were large trains of people stacked on cars like they do in India going into and out of the plant to swap out workers for the day.
Also inside the building laid a gigantic atrium, a ten-story atrium surround by building. Along each floor I could see onlookers looking out into the atrium. Then I noticed a phantom floating about inside the atrium. It was huge. The face it had was of an old man, almost like the Freeze miser from that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer specials. His body was skinny and emaciated, and the lack of legs and tattered rags that are so adorning of a phantom was none other then the American flag.
Here this thing floated in misery in its prison of this grand industry that it was once lord of.
Then a buzzer sounded and I heard a train starting to move. A door opened up and a it started to come out of the building. There were flatbed cars covered with migrant workers. They all had instruments and appeared to be standing on a stage. Then they all started singing “Farwell Ride” by Beck. It was creepy.
I shook my head and started to walk down a roadway. The road was made of cobblestone and there were horse and carriages coming to and fro. Most of the carriages were empty. It was like the horses were on some predetermined route and were able to operate by themselves.
Some of the carriages had fat people in them. All the carriages that were occupied had a mask hanging off the back of them. They were the types of masks that were used in old theater presentations. Either laughing or crying. Most of them were crying.
I then walked up to a house with a fat man in the front yard. He way dressed nicely and was scurrying about. He had asked for my help and I realized he was building a small stone circle so he could play marbles.
Then I woke up, weird.
Weather
39 degrees outside and it’s starting to cloud up for some rain coming.