JSC (AV) - Skylab 4 - Liquid Floating Zone - TV 101 Part 7

Description

N225 to FR A225 (TAPE Luts off 10, Part SKYLAB 4 KINESCOPE TAPE 10, PART 1 of 2 Welcome to Skylab 3. Today let's talk about what some of these objects I have have in common. Screwdriver, pair of scissors, recorder, for that matter, this TV camera. Each one of those has a quality and that quality is dependent upon the material from which they are made. That's true for most things that we work with. Up here in Skylab, we plan to study a little bit the techniques which things are made, particularly solids and how they cool, how they're formed from a liquid, and how they actually become a solid. In (garble) going from a liquid from a solid at which the quality of the material is determined to a large degree. Particularly, if we look at soap and crystals which transistors are made from, which are the heart of this TV camera and the electronics industry. We find that as they cool, the gravity which we have down there on earth, which every transistor so far has been made in the presence of, we find that the gravity tends to make the warmer or the hotter material move to the surface as its cooling. Same thing happens at home - if you notice, your second story is always a little bit warmer than your first - all the heat is up the ceiling. Same thing happens to a solid, whether it be a metal or a crystal. Now this convection tends to create very small nonuniformities in the material - nonuniformities can change the property and usually degrade it. Also, we find that contamination can come from a container which (garble) vat of metal - you cool it, you find that (garble) change the properties of the material. But in zero-G, we don't have that problem. We're able to essentially trade a mass of liquid hot, let it cool, with no contamination from the side and no convection to change its property. We're gonna' be studying a little bit for the next couple of days, one particular way of forming crystals which Dr. John Carouthers, one of the people working in the field right now, feels is a very promising way in which to grow crystals with exceptionally pure uniform properties. This will enable us to rate much smaller crystals, or much smaller transistors, if you will, or smaller circuitry, and we think make an improvement in the electronics industry. However, what we're gonna be doing has application in many fields - just the plain study of fluid mechanics in zero-G I think you'll see is gonna' be fun, and it's also got some very basic applications. Where we're gonna' be doing this is with this homemade device here that we have taken and used four mounts - one, two, three, four - and these mounts are pretty much the same that hold up the TV camera - line them up, taken some of our tools which are extension shafts for some of the (garble) that we have, and mounted them in here so that they are free to turn. We'll be placing the fluid in between the two here, which you'll be able to get a closeup view of here on this camera Page 2 and then we're going to turn it. We're gonna' turn both of them simultan- eously, using this string and rod, pulling it up. We could change the speed, we could rotate them in the opposite directions, and we can also move the distance apart. We'll be placing colored fluids in here, hopefully SO that you're better able to visualize what is happening. Now the reason we've chosen this particular scheme here is that four growing crystals you need to heat the material which you're working with to get it to be a fluid, and this is a unique and prmising way to do it - put the material in here, have a furnace around the outside of and slowly rotate it, very slowly SO that you get very uniform heating, another consideration - getting uniforming heating that as it cools you can also allow it to cool very slowly by changing the amount of heat that it gets and to allow it to cool uniformly, you need to slowly rotate it because you cannot build a perfectly uniform heater. So the situation we're faced with is a fluid in here which will be rotating. Let's see what happens. Let's see, we're picking up here again on TV 101. What we're looking at here are the two ends in which I have injected 3 CC. of water each, the one on the left with red dye in it, and the one on the right here clear, although it does have some bubbles in it. First I'll move them together, and then we'll do the rotation. Let me move you in so you can get a little better look at how these two surfaces make contact. Okay, we're coming in slowly with the red one - watch it oscillate there I'll try to set up an oscillation (garble) where the motion is perpendicular to the plate on which set up anything that is in the direction which rotates the plate on (tape cutting off) ...and I hope you can see the interspace between the two and we're ready for the rctation. I'm gonna' try to rotate this so that I'll be moving the every 10 seconds and I think one thing that ought to be done here is to move you back a little bit okay, we're in motion now that appears and let's see what happens. Tends to become unstable, surface in fighting the centrifugal force now we'll do thatonce again and next time I'll vary the rotation rate and get it a little higher, but what we'd like to look at now is effects of vibration. Okay, that is, separate one from the other as we did before okay, effects for vibration - let's see if we can't set up a standing rate now if I increase the frequency just a little bit, we can catch it in that mode but not much mass exchange Page 4 Now what I should have done there I guess for you is to give you a little further backview of that. Perhaps I was a little bit close. We'll go ahead and quickly rewind here and give you another one.

Collection

Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Series

Moving Images Relating to Documentary Stock Footage