Labview musical

Good afternoon,

Yet another week has passed, but we haven't aged a day.

So we have made the first soil column, a 50cm long acrylic tube packed with fine sand. I had never made a soil column before but the process was fairly straight forward. The ends are capped with stainless steel fittings and screened with US 200 sieve mesh. To pack the column, we oriented the tube vertically and filled it halfway with water. The sand was poured into the top and the mixture was agitated using a dremel tool to promote settling and compaction. Great care must be taken to ensure no air becomes trapped in the soil to avoid heterogeneity along the column.

The column is now connected to a piston pump that is regulated using labview. At any one time there can be 3 computers operating different pump systems in the lab. Each creates a different tone signature as it steps through the specified flow rates. Accompanied by the slow bass of the sieve shaker, this machine quartet creates a cacophony of sound I find myself humming before I fall asleep at night. Sometimes I even catch my movements carry out to the tempo of the 'music'.

This week my goals are to finish calibrating the soil column apparatus and to finish the experiments using capillary tubes. At first we will use just water in the column to validate our approach. I would like to start measuring shear thinning behavior in the fine sand and glass beads before next week. All while we dance to the sounds of syringe pumps.