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Rubens Tube Project

Posted Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 10:33 pm → 3 years, 9 months ago

Or alternately, The Rubens Tube Project thus far.* This is going to be my journal of information covering my physics project for the semester.

I’m sure you have seen it, there is a video circulating around the net that shows a guy in his garage with a plastic tube. At first you wonder what is up but then he lights the tube. (which happens to have hundreds of holes drilled at a distance of about 1 inch per hole. This intrigues you, but you still don’t know what is going on. He walks off the screen and starts playing a tone, and the shape of the flame changes, forming a wave. Instantly it clicks, He is proving sound is a wave by using fire to visualize the changes in pressure.

I saw that video a few weeks ago, and thought it was cool, so when our teacher told us to figure out what we wanted to do for our project at the end of the quarter, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. A friend and I partnered up and asked the teacher if it was ok. Not only did she say it was fine, but apparently she had a paper with how to do it and the math of the wave made by the sound. We knew we were going to be making a rubens tube; the question was when.

Part 1 - Saturday, December 2nd, 2006

“when,” turned out to be today. After waking up at the young hour of one o’ clock, I ate and then received a call from my project partner, Ben. I packing my supplies, then Ben came ove and picked me up.**We began our “rubens tube” by using a chalk line to make a straight line on 5″ piece of PVC pipe that Ben had previously purchased.I then went down the pipe and marked every inch using a pencil and a tape measure. I had wondered about this part after deciding to take on this project and then watching the video again; would it be hard to drill alot of holes in a pipe and get them straight? I suggested we use a hammer and nail to start each holes before we begin drilling.After finishing that, Ben began to drill the holes. (He made one hole every inch and the pipe is 5 feet long (60 inches=58holes)) We finished that aspect of the project and it only took us thirty minutes. After that we moved on to figuring out how we were going to get the gas into the tube.We actually spent a good ten minutes talking about where to put the two holes for the hoses coming from the propane tank. In the end I think we decided that it really matter since the entire tube should be a chamber of uniform gas distribution, so we just put the holes where it would put the least stress on the hoses. I thought we were going with a more permanent way of sealing the hoses in the tube, but apparently Ben was thinking tape, so we went with tape. First with a layer of electrical tape, then we covered that mess with Duct Tape. This method worked surprisingly well. I was in charge of making the sound work. My dad brought home an old pair of computer speakers that where exactly 3 inches, It was a Perfect fit. I had previously downloaded some sinusoid-type software for testing the capabilities of speakers and put it on my dads laptop. The software is capable of outputting specific frequencies, and that is exactly what we needed. The only problem with the software, was that I downloaded the (free)trial version and it limited the tones to 15 second clips. All I had to do was plug the speaker into the laptop and run the program. Back to the Story, where we decided to leave out the speaker until we knew this tube was going to work and not become a flaming cannon of death.This was our moment of glory. Our little contraption was shaping up into an impressive piece of work. We moved our project from the garage and into the back yard.*** I set up the camera on the tripod and started recording, Ben got a fire extinguisher from his kitchen. We turned on the gas, waited, then tried to lite it. And waited, and waited. We eventually got a small flame lite, but it was not going to cut it for what we needed. We figured out a few things around that time that we would use later that evening.****

1. We needed something to keep the pipe from burning. Our quick solution was to wrap the tube in Aluminum foil.
2. The Propane tank wasn’t expelling enough gas. I suggested it was the temperature. I was right.
3. The wind was going to be a problem, we needed to move back into the garage.

*I will be updating this information sometime this week

**Only, I forgot one, my cameras memory card, that means I only got 24 pictures of todays activity. Only 60-70% of those pictures turned out ok, and about 70% of those pictures are relevant to the project

***to remove the risk of harm to the house if this thing were to blow

****This is where we stopped working for 2 hours and played Spliter Cell Chaos Theory Coop Multiplayer

Part 2 - Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 - Evening

After a good couple of hours playing games me and Ben moved the rubens tube into the garage and shut the garage door. We needed to wait until his parents were home before we lite the tube in the house. Eventually, that time came and we could begin get this thing running and hopefully get some data too.

We used an oddly shaped bucket half filled with warm water to heat up the tank before we got it lite. Now that we had solved all the problems we found before, it was time to light it attempt to light it. (once again).

It worked. Yes it worked, but I couldn’t get any more pictures or video because as I previously stated, I forgot the card for my camera. Never fear, tomorrow I will get a few hundred pictures and a video or two for you. After we got it working we began to run tests and all that boring stuff. After a few runs with the project we started noticing that the holes were melting and then closing up. Actually we started noticing alot of things that could be better, so we began to optimize our rubens tube. We headed off to Walmart, only to return again with really expensive tape, which replaced our rather hasty aluminium foil job.* This is about where everything starts to get blurry, because I was getting tired (it was 11pm.)

*It was waterproof/foil tape

Part 3 - Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

Today was good, my project partner (ben) and I meet up again to finish getting readings for the project and to take some video/ pictures.

We started by setting up the tube once again. Sticking the tank in a pan of warm watter again. Lighting it again. Everything worked fine, until we tried to play a sound again. For some reason the sound just wasn’t making the waves like it was supposed to. It wasn’t doing much of anything to the flames. So we put out the fire, ben remade his “seals” and I took off the speaker to see what was up. Nothing was wrong with them. Their was a brown spot but that was from an early flare up that happened half way through the second day, and the speaker continued to work after that. I stuck the speaker back on and ben had finished his job, It was time to test again. (I also made sure to turn up the volume on the laptop too, which I believe was the real problem) We got our measurments done and pretty much tied up all the “scientific” stuff we needed to do,(mostly just getting a few measurements for a couple other frequencies)we also had time to mess around a little, and pose for our corperate sponsor, Mountain Dew. While we were messing around, we had a little accident. Bens great idea of using tape as a seal didn’t work so great. Gas leaking from the tape eventually came all the way up to the top where it was ignited by the already existing flames.Overall I would say this project turned out to be a great sucess. We learned a couple things and had good fun doing it. If you want to see more pictures, I suggest you check out the Photo Set.

by the way, there is video, but I haven’t unloaded it from my camera and uploaded it yet. I’m also planning on getting some video when we show this in class

See All the Photos Here