Centrifuge at Carleton

Thanks to an internally funded collaborative project with the Engineering department, I get to spend some of my days hanging out at Carleton Lab on CU's main campus. In particular I get to spend time near this beast: a 5 meter-arm, 200 g geotechnical Centrifuge.

In particular, we will be making ice samples in this big steel cylinder that will sit atop a rotating rock base, in order to measure friction and bed evolution as a function of velocity, debris content, and normal stress, which is applied via g force in the centrifuge. The rig that will ride in the cage of the centrifuge was custom made in Taiwan and, after a string of unfortunate events, arrived late last spring. 

I'll write much more about this new rig in months to come. There are a lot of tasks necessary to get it to maintain a low enough temperature to make and keep ice, to measure normal load (at 1 g) and torque, to ultimately measure and control pore pressure in the melt that will form at the interface... Lots to do.

I was wiring up thermocouples the other day and I had a treat. Visiting graduate student Hsiu-Chuan Hsu was running some of his slope collapse experiments in the centrifuge. He loaded up the transparent beads in silicon oil in a very high tech fish tank in the centrifuge cage. Liming closed the very heavy, very thick safety door of the centrifuge room.

Then from the control panel they started cranking up the g.

Look at it go!

It has arrived!!!

There were very exciting happenings in the rock mechanics lab yesterday. Our shipment from NER arrived. Off of an Air-ride truck, straight outa Hanover, came seven large items. 

 Some of them were very large items!

Stripping off the protective plastic you can see the Lexan-housed intensifiers (right) and main unit (left) which houses the electronics.

Also in that main unit, we will install the pressure vessel. Currently that steel vessel and the mounting plate weigh ~1200 lbs. They came in a separate crate. 

Three wood crates came in all. 

Once we took off the tops, we could peer inside. One box contained the main pressure vessel, one the CO2 gas mixing vessel and the final one the computer and miscellaneous supplies.

As soon as we got everything opened up and inspected, the "Traffic" team came over to help us move it all out of the prep room and into the rig room. 

First lining it up with the double doors between labs, then taking it off the wooden shipping pallets.

And then moving each piece into its designated blue-taped space. It is a thing of beauty!

I can't wait to get started on some experiments. Thank you New England Research for building us our custom High P - High T Autolab 2000!  And big shout out to Peter Kelemen for getting the funds to purchase this rig. Now let's mineralize some carbon!!

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.