After an amazing week (last week) at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition with Tokamak Energy it was a rather quiet day at Imperial College. The group meeting at 10:30am showed me how much the group had progressed during the week I was away. Plans for new laser systems were already underway! It was nice to have another female in the group meeting this time and she contributed to others' work - girl power! I then spoke with Roland and I was ready to start taking measurements of the dimensions of the popomatic for replication on AutoCAD, a computer aided design (CAD) software. Before this, I had lunch with some PhD students and was surprised to see how human they were! They had lives outside their work! Unlike the typical stereotype of physicists who are seen as people who work non-stop and never take their eyes off books or the computer. They spoke about films, sports and anything human you could ever imagine - made me feel like I could fit in.
After this, I began taking some safety measurements. I was trying to work out whether the class 3B laser would be safe if viewed via diffuse reflections from the base of the popomatic. Turns out I could use a 100mW laser rather than the previous 60mW laser and still be within safe limits! So the new popomatic will have a higher power laser - more balloon popping power! The measurements of the popomatic then began with a digital vernier calliper and tape measurer. I then noted these measurements down and drew the popomatic by hand with the measurements I took since I had trouble downloading the software. I may give my hand drawings to a PhD student in the Plasma Physics Group since he offered to create a CAD model of the popomatic if I experienced any problems - he has previous experience with CAD software and said he could do it in minutes!
Day 2
After downloading AutoCAD Inventor, a CAD software I began modelling the popomatic. The software was easy to use and quickly the top and bottom lids were modelled. But the centre of the popomatic was quite complicated with many parts. But by the end of the day I had a rough model of the popomatic with optics!
Day 3
After editing a parts list for the popomatic and adding things like handles, a higher power laser and adding links to each part, I attended a seminar hosted by the Plasma Group. The first speaker was a PhD student and I managed to understand his talk! Normally seminars from groups are way beyond me and I get overwhelmed with the physics. He was very comprehensive and made it all very easy to understand! He was talking about how magnetic fields can confine plasmas and that he was developing some code to model the behaviour of this and in particular what was found in the OMEGA experiment. The second speaker was a postgraduate that spoke about plasma guns - and he was testing this in the lab. I've gotta see this!
After lunch I travelled back to my old school for the second last science club session of the academic year :( The students made jelly optics and then tried to view the Sun with a telescope! But we couldn't view anything because of the rain and clouds. :(
Day 4
After a late start because of the tube strikes I was planning for my last science club session of this academic year. I've planned so many cool demos for the students to see before they start summer! This includes:
I'm hoping the students will like it!
After dealing with a few emails, I got to work on making a CAD model of the casing of the popomatic and plugged in the real-life measurements of the current popomatic into the software. I hope to then send these files to companies to get the casing made for me so that I can start engineering!
Day 5
After a slow morning sorting out some emails, and making sure my CAD model was correct. I then had a short meeting with my supervisor. On Monday morning, I shall be starting some spectroscopic work where I shall get a fibre-based white light source and a USB spectrometer and hopefully obtain the 'white' spectrum before Monday's group meeting at 4:30 pm.
I made a quick trip to the science museum to get some science-y gifts for the staff in the Science Department at my old school and while I was there I found some cool postcards!
After a slow morning sorting out some emails, and making sure my CAD model was correct. I then had a short meeting with my supervisor. On Monday morning, I shall be starting some spectroscopic work where I shall get a fibre-based white light source and a USB spectrometer and hopefully obtain the 'white' spectrum before Monday's group meeting at 4:30 pm.
I made a quick trip to the science museum to get some science-y gifts for the staff in the Science Department at my old school and while I was there I found some cool postcards!
No comments:
Post a Comment