Student Research
Some recent on-campus research projects:
Korey Cable measured the drag force on a sphere using a Baal's wind tunnel. The small wind tunnel, which she constructed, provided the appropriate wind velocity to displace a sphere for measurement. She used the wind tunnel to measure the drag force on a sphere as function of wind velocity in the tunnel.
Alejandro Victoria measured the temperature dependence of the dielectric constant of barium titanate near its phase transitions and Curie temperature.. The Curie temperature was found to be near 100K. The lower phase transition exhibited hysteresis in the dielectric constant as a function of temperature.
Craig McNamara studied carnuba electrets, which are quasi permanently polarized dielectrics. They have the interesting property that, after formation, they exhibit an electric field which reverses direction and strengthens with time. He maintained the electrets and used them to produce an electric field to power an electrostatic motor with the potential to run off the Earth's atmospheric electric potential.
Jingo Endo studied the dynamics of rolling objects in order to explain the spiral path that a rolling disk takes as it loses its potential energy while its kinetic energy stays constant. He studied the rolling resistance force as a function of speed and angle. Then, he simulated the paths of the disk on a computer program. He also showed that the speed of the disk was constant due to its nonholonomic constraint.
Jason Drotar did a theoretical study of the mathematical structure of spacetime in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Initially, Jason spent some time learning the mathematics behind Einstein's field equation and the Schwarzschild solution. Then, he numerically solved the geodesic equation to examine particle motion in a gravitational field produced by a spherically symmetric mass distribution.
Jon Pesansky built an apparatus to study chaos in a flexible beam, In this apparatus, the lower end of an inverted beam is attracted to one of two magnets mounted below the beam. As the entire assembly of beam, supports and magnets is rocked back and forth by a motor driven device, the free end of the beam jumps back and forth between the two magnets. A piezoelectric crystal mounted on the beam sends data about the position of the beam to a computer at regular time intervals. Jon then used a fast Fourier transform to analyze this data to determine the rocking speeds for which the jumping is chaotic.
Will Vander Voort worked on computer generated holography. Will used Visual Basic to write computer programs to generate the Fourier transform of an object and print out a 2-dimensional representation of this transform. The resulting image, when shrunk photographically, is a hologram. If the hologram is illuminated by laser light an image will be created.
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