Ted's 50 Year Anniversary

This fall marked a momentous occasion: the 50 Year Anniversary of Ted's working at Lamont. That was actually the same year they added the Doherty to the name of Lamont. To celebrate the occasion, we threw a party in his honor in Monell. There was a great spread...

...great turnout of all his friends and former and present coworkers...

some speeches and sharing of "Teddy" stories...

an "award" that was bestowed on him, in commemoration of his many years, and his legendary accumulation of items from around campus...

And an eclectic poster with accessories from many of the groups he's helped (OBS, Marine, Rock Mechanics).

Congratulations, Ted!

Extreme makeover gets even more extreme: Part 1, the rig room

Well, after years of considering it, and some serious negotiations, and lots us hemming and hawing, we've decided to move the rock mechanics lab (which is now being dubbed "the Rock and Ice Mechanics Lab", I hope it sticks) to the other side of campus into the big warehouse that houses shipping and receiving and was formerly a 20-man machine shop (which I previously wrote about here).
Specifically, we're moving into a two-room combo that has large double doors connecting the two rooms. So we'll have one room for all the testing rigs ("the rig room") and one room that we'll do all our prep work, prototyping, building in (think anything that gets messy). But these rooms were not quite ready for us to move on in. First, all the previous owner's things needed to be removed.

I'm not exactly sure where they ran off to in such a hurry. There were a few things left behind.

But once that got cleared out, you could see the potential. I picked out paint (when deciding between two bluish-gray-white colors for the walls, one was called "Icy", which of course was the one it was destined to be).

They spray-insulated the ceiling, painted the floors a nice concrete color, and started working on new air supply and electrical around the room.  Then all the goodies started to arrive.

In those boxes are new benches, a new freezer. Oh and we got new lights and new windows installed. Plus...

...a new sink!!  I'm not sure why this became such an issue, but we had to really negotiate for this bad boy. I guess they didn't want to go through the concrete for the plumbing, so tried to talk us out of one. But when we insisted, they had to fabricate this whole up and over the door pump/drainage scheme. 

Then things started to get a little whacky. I decided that I wanted to color coordinate the storage cabinets with the door trim of the rig room. So began a somewhat ridiculous DIY project. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that I should have sprayed instead of used a brush...but alas, once I got started, I stayed the course. 

But now we have benches in, a vibration-free table ready for the cryo rig, a space cleared for our AutoLab 2000 (more about that later), and pretty cabinets that match the trim.

View from the other direction. Double doors lead to the prep room. Just you wait until we get that TV put up! 

Open Lab week and the Es

This year during the week before Open House, an Open Lab day was scheduled, where we at Lamont could check out what our co-workers are up to. This happened to coincide with an NYC school holiday. So, my wee ("E1") and my coworker's wee ("E2") were in for a treat.
They saw how the tree ring folks take little non-destructive cores of trees. I was told all about the significance of tree rings that night over dinner.

 And Nick showed them the IcePod and how it connects to an airplane to take radar measurements of Greenland and Antarctica.

E1 was pretty amused with the teeny tiny orange Ice Pod. 

Now as for Open House itself, I was too busy manning the slider block table to take any pictures, but there is a great highlight page here.

Hanami 2019

Quite possibly the nicest hanami ever. Usually come mid-April we are freezing our butts off out there on the blue tarp. This year's hanami was warm and sunny. We had Atsuko Namiki visiting us from Hiroshima. We had a nice spread of food and Ben's shochu. Really nice time.

Is Rob making a still?

Came into the lab to find this. I have no idea what's going on here, but I love the looks of this curly tube funnel thing.

Progress on Cryostat version 3.0

In our ongoing efforts to make our cryostat go colder and colder, Mike designed these.

They are the cooling blocks that go right next to the sample and have chilled fluid (coming from a custom LN-controlled chiller that Mike made) pumped into those channels. 

The inner side (closest to sample) is high thermal conductivity aluminum and the outer side is insulating PMMA. In order to seal them together, both sides needed to be roughened. But he left the little viewing window smooth. That way we can see (and potentially image) the sliding interfaces.

More regelation

This fall we had 5 students from a local high school come one day a week for lab activities. In addition to a long term regelation project, each week there were lab exercises. These exercises
ranged from cheese squeezing, to phase equilibria, to earthquake triangulation. We also gave another go at the classic regelation experiment. I tried this with students in the summer and the ice pieces were too small and some wire was too thin. This time I think we got the right combination.

The idea is that the pressure is great enough just below the wire that it pressure melts the ice but then right above the wire the pressure is low and it refreezes, thereby trapping the wire inside the ice as it makes its way down. Theoretically, the thermal conductivity of the wire is important for the process.

Success!

The students then applied this idea to a long term project in which ice was placed on top of beads and a weight was placed on top. Each week they used a different size or different type of bead. In theory if the bead is embedded into the ice by viscous (solid-state) creep, then it wouldn't matter what type of metal was used. But if it occurs by regelation, then the type of metal (and therefore the thermal conductivity) is important. They had really nice results demonstrating a mix of both types of deformation depending on the conditions (particularly the size of the bead, which controls the stress). 

The work was all done in a commercial chest freezer, which isn't ideal for temperature control, since it oscillates with the freezer's duty cycle, but is good for a school project lasting all semester.

They became familiar with running experiments, taking notes, analyzing data and communication results (we had an informal poster session at the end of the term)

Rock Mechanics at AGU

This year's AGU was held in DC. It was fun to check out a new venue, but not fun getting lost trying to find everything. The convention space, which connected underground to the Marriott next door, was just cavernous. And I don't think we've all really mastered where to put ourselves.

Despite that, I did manage to make it to most everyone's posters ...

...including my own (though my shift was at 8am, so it was rough)