Month: April 1997

What are some general uses of X-rays other than medical?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

What are some general uses of X-rays other than medical? — SD, Raleigh, NC

There are so many non-medical uses for X-rays that I’ll limit myself to two: industrial imaging and X-ray crystallography. Industrial X-ray imaging is used frequently in manufacturing to inspect finished materials. An important example of this imaging is in weld inspection. After a sheet of steel has been rolled into a pipe and the seam of that pipe has been welded closed, it’s often important to inspect the weld to be sure that it’s solid and leak free. Sometimes a weld that looks perfect to the eye has hollow spots or other flaws that can only be seen by looking through the material of the weld. This inspection is done with high energy X-rays—X-rays that are able to penetrate a thick steel plate to look for bubbles or unwanted inclusions.

X-ray crystallography is an important tool for materials science and molecular biology. Just as the colored interference patterns that appear on a soap bubble when sunlight reflects from that bubble tell you something about the structure of that soap bubble, so the X-rays that reflect from a crystal tell you something about the structure of that crystal. X-rays experience interference after they reflect from a crystal and the interference patterns can tell you where individual atoms are located within a crystal or within the molecules from which the crystal is made. Materials scientists use this information to understand the crystals they have produced while molecular biologists use it to understand the molecular structures of complicated biological molecules.

Why is it that when you put two electric lamps into a circuit in parallel with o…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

Why is it that when you put two electric lamps into a circuit in parallel with one another, the current through the circuit increases, while when you put those two lamps in series with one another, the current through the circuit decreases?

When the two lamps are in parallel with one another, they share the current passing through the rest of the circuit. Current arriving at the two lamps can pass through either lamp before continuing its trip around the circuit. The two lamps operate independently and each one draws the current that it normally does when it experiences the voltage drop provided by the rest of the circuit. With both lamps providing a path for current, the current through the rest of the circuit is the sum of the currents through the two lamps.

But when the two lamps are in series with one another, each lamp carries the entire current passing through the circuit. Current arriving at the two lamps must pass first through one lamp and then through the other lamp before continuing its trip around the circuit. There is no need to add the currents passing through the lamps because it is the same current in each lamp. Moreover, the voltage drop provided by the rest of the circuit is being shared by the two lamps so that each lamp experiences roughly half the overall voltage drop. Since lamps draw less current as the voltage drop they experience decreases, these lamps draw less current when they must share the voltage drop. Thus the current passing through the circuit is much less when the two lamps are inserted into the circuit in series than in parallel.

How do long range metal detectors work?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How do long range metal detectors work? — AS

In general, metal detectors find metal objects by looking for their electromagnetic responses. For example, you can tell when an iron or steel object is nearby by waving a magnet around. If you feel something attracting the magnet, you can be pretty sure that there is a piece of iron or steel nearby. Similarly, if you wave a strong magnet rapidly across an aluminum or copper surface, you’ll feel a drag effect as the moving magnet causes electric currents to flow in the metal surface—electric currents are themselves magnetic.

Of course, a real metal detector is much more sensitive than your hands are, but it’s using similar principles to detect nearby metal. Most often, a metal detector uses a coil of wire with an alternating current in it to create a rapidly changing magnetic field around the coil. If that changing magnetic field enters a piece of nearby metal, the metal responds. If the metal is ferromagnetic—meaning that it has intrinsic magnetic order like iron or steel—it will respond strongly with its own magnetic field. If the metal is non-ferromagnetic—meaning that it doesn’t have the appropriate intrinsic magnetic order—it will respond more weakly with magnetic fields that are caused by electric currents that begin to flow through it.

In a short range metal detector, the detector looks for the direct interaction of its magnetic field and a nearby piece of metal. That nearby metal changes the characteristics of the detector’s wire coil in a way that’s relatively easy to detect. But in a longer-range metal detector, the electromagnetic coil must actually radiate an electromagnetic wave and then look for the reflection of this electromagnetic wave from a more distant piece of metal. That’s because the magnetic field of the coil doesn’t extend outward forever—it dies away a few diameters of the coil away from the coil itself. For the metal detector to look for metal farther away, it needs help carrying the magnetic field through space. By combining an electric field with the magnetic field, the long-range metal detector creates an electromagnetic wave—a radio wave—that travels independently through space. Electromagnetic waves reflect from many things, particularly objects that conduct electricity. So the long-range metal detector launches an electromagnetic wave and then looks for the reflection of that wave. This wave reflection technique is the basis for sonar (sound waves) and radar (radio waves), and it can be used to find metals deep in the ground. Unfortunately, the ground itself conducts electricity to some extent, so it becomes harder and harder to distinguish the reflections from metal from the reflections from other things in the ground.

What is torque?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

What is torque? — JPT, Calgary, Alberta

A torque is a physicist’s word for a twist or a spin. When you twist the top off a jar, you are exerting a torque on the jar and causing it to undergo an angular acceleration—it begins to rotate faster and faster in the direction of your torque. Similarly, when you spin a toy top, you do this by exerting a torque on the top and it again undergoes an angular acceleration.

How does a siren work?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does a siren work? — MM, Waterloo, Iowa

A siren uses a perforated disk or drum to alternately block and unblock a stream of air. The classic siren has a spinning disk with a pattern of holes around its periphery. This disk is spun in front of a jet of air, producing pressure pulses that we hear as sound. A more modern siren has a spinning centrifugal fan that propels air radially outward through a pattern of holes in a drum around the fan. This centrifugal siren is much louder than the disc siren because the centrifugal system pushes large pulses of air through many openings at once, whereas the disc siren only has one pulsed source of air.

How does an operational amplifier work?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does an operational amplifier work? — BR

An operational amplifier is an extremely high gain differential voltage amplifier—a device that compares the voltages of two inputs and produces an output voltage that’s many times the difference between their voltages. How the operational amplifier performs this subtraction and multiplication process depends on the type of operational amplifier, but in most cases two input voltages control how current is shared between two paths of a parallel circuit. Even a tiny difference between the input voltages produces a large current difference in the two paths—the path that’s controlled by the higher voltage input carries a much larger current than the other path. The imbalance in currents between the two paths produces significant voltage differences in their components and these voltage differences are again compared in a second stage of differential voltage amplification. Eventually the differences in currents and voltage become quite large and a final amplifier stage is used to produce either a large positive output voltage or a large negative output voltage, depending on which input has the higher voltage. In a typical application, feedback is used to keep the two input voltages very close to one another, so that the output voltage actually falls in between its two extremes. At that operating point, the operational amplifier is exquisitely sensitive to even the tiniest changes in its input voltages and makes a wonderful amplifier for small electric signals.

How does a video recorder work?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does a video recorder work? — SH, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

A video recorder is much like a normal tape recorder, except that it records far more information each second. When you play an audiotape in a normal tape recorder, small magnetized regions of tape move past a playback head. This playback head consists of an iron ring with a narrow gap in it and there is a coil of wire wrapped around the ring. As the magnetized regions of the tape pass near the ring’s gap, they magnetize the ring. The ring’s magnetization changes as the tape moves and these changing magnetizations cause currents to flow in the coil of wire. These currents are amplified and used to reproduce sound. When you record the tape, the recorder sends currents through the wire coil, magnetizing the iron ring and causing it to magnetize the region of tape that’s near the gap in the ring.

In a video recorder, the tape moves too slowly to produce the millions of the magnetization changes needed each second to represent a video signal. So instead of moving the tape past the playback head, the video recorder moves the playback head past the tape. As the tape travels slowly through the recorder, the playback head spins past it on a smooth cylindrical support. The tape is wrapped part way around this support and two or more playback heads take turns detecting the patches of magnetization on the tape’s surface. The tape is tilted slightly with respect to the spinning heads so that the heads sweep both along the tape and across its width. That way, the entire surface of the tape is used to record the immense amount of information needed to reproduce images on a television screen. During recording, currents are sent through the heads so that they magnetize the tape rather than reading its magnetization.

How are magnets made and what are they made of?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How are magnets made and what are they made of? — S, San Francisco, CA

The strongest modern magnets are made by assembling lots of tiny magnetic particles into a solid object. These magnetic particles are “intrinsically” magnetic, meaning that the atoms from which the particles are formed retain their magnetism in coming together as a solid. Electrons are naturally magnetic and most atoms exhibit the magnetism of their electrons. But as these atoms come together to form a solid, most of them lose their magnetism. For example, copper, aluminum, gold, and silver are all nonmagnetic solids built from magnetic atoms. There are only a few materials that don’t lose their atomic magnetism and might be suitable for making permanent magnets. However, most of these magnetic materials only exhibit their magnetism when exposed to other magnets—when they’re alone, their magnetism is mostly hidden. For example, iron and steel are magnetic materials but they only appear strongly magnetic when you bring a permanent magnet near them.

To make a strong permanent magnet, you must find a material that is both intrinsically magnetic and that is able to stay magnetic when it’s by itself. Materials that hide their magnetism when alone do this by allowing their magnetic structure to break up into tiny pieces that all point in different directions. Each of these tiny magnetic pieces is called a magnetic domain, and iron and steel are normally composed of many magnetic domains. A good permanent magnet material is one that is intrinsically magnetic and that resists the formation of randomly oriented magnetic domains. A very effective way to make such permanent magnet materials is to assemble lots of tiny magnetic particles. Each of these particles is shaped in a way that makes one of its ends a north pole and its other end a south pole, and that makes it extremely hard for these two poles to exchange places. The particles are then aligned with one another and bonded together to form a permanent magnet. To make sure that the particles all have their north poles at one end and their south poles at the other end, the finished magnet is exposed to an extremely strong magnetic field—one so strong that it flips any misaligned magnetic particles into alignment with the others. After being magnetized in this manner, the permanent magnet is very hard to demagnetize, which is just what you want in a permanent magnet.

The most common magnet materials are Ferrite and Alnico. Ferrite magnets are made from a mixture of iron oxide and barium, strontium, or lead oxide. Alnico magnets are made from aluminum, nickel, iron, and cobalt, and consist of tiny particles of an iron-nickel-aluminum alloy inside an iron-cobalt alloy. But the strongest modern magnets are made from an iron-neodymium-boron alloy. The latter magnets are very resistant to demagnetization and the forces they exert on one another are amazingly strong.

How does an electromagnetic doorbell work?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does an electromagnetic doorbell work? — SH, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

When you press the button of an electromagnetic doorbell, you complete a circuit that includes a source of electric power (typically a low voltage transformer) and a hollow coil of wire. Once the circuit is complete, current begins to flow through it and the coil of wire becomes magnetic. Extending outward from one end of the coil of wire is an iron rod. When this the coil of wire—also called a solenoid—becomes magnetic, so does the iron rod. The iron rod becomes magnetic in such a way that it’s attracted toward and into the solenoid, and it accelerates toward the solenoid. The attractive force diminishes once the rod is all the way inside the solenoid, but the rod then has momentum and it keeps on going out the other side of the solenoid. It travels so far out of the solenoid that it strikes a bell on the far side—the doorbell! The rod rebounds from the bell and reverses is motion. It has traveled so far out the other side of the solenoid that it’s attracted back in the opposite direction. The rod overshoots the solenoid again and, in some doorbells, strikes a second bell having a somewhat different pitch from the first bell. After this back and forth motion, the rod usually settles down in the middle of the solenoid and doesn’t move again until you stop pushing the button. Once you release the button, the current in the circuit vanishes and the solenoid and the rod stop being magnetic. A weak spring then pulls the rod back to its original position at one end of the solenoid.

How does a rail gun work?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does a rail gun work?

A rail gun is a device that uses an electromagnetic force to accelerate a projectile to very high speeds. This acceleration technique is based on the fact that whenever an electrically charged particle moves in the presence of a magnetic field, it experiences a force that pushes it perpendicular to both its direction of travel and the magnetic field. In a rail gun, this perpendicular magnetic force—known as the Lorentz force—pushes the projectile along two metal rails and can accelerate it to almost limitless speeds.

The rail gun’s projectile must conduct electricity and it completes the electric circuit formed by two parallel metal rails and a high current power source. During the rail gun’s operation, current flows out of the power source through one rail, passes through the projectile, and returns to the power source through the other rail. As it passes through the two rails, the electric current produces an intense magnetic field between the rails. The projectile is exposed to this magnetic field and as charged particles pass through the projectile, they experience a Lorentz force that pushes them and the projectile in one direction along the rails. The projectile picks up speed as it travels along the rails and doesn’t stop accelerating until the current ceases or it leaves the rails. In practice, the power sources used in most rail guns is a large bank of capacitors. These devices store separated electric charge and supply enormous currents to the rails for a brief period of time.