helmholtzresonator
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You are viewing stuff tagged with helmholtzresonator.
Mykala and I saw some great science demos on Jay Leno; they were centered around a chemical called sulfur hexafluoride. Heretofore, I hadn’t heard of it. It has some really unique properties - for one, it’s a super dense gas, and so it flows like an invisible liquid. You can float boats (well, makeshift aluminum foil rafts) on it when it’s in a fish tank, and it puts out fires like no one’s business (which is the reason it is used in electrical installations). It is extremely non-reactive, not unlike Teflon or other perfluorinated hydrocarbons (though, it’s a sulfur compound). Anyhow, I got to looking it up on Sigma Aldrich, which is the chemical company I ordered chemicals from when I worked organic synthesis at St. Thomas. So, the 99.75% pure form of sulfur hexafluoride clocks in at a smidge over a dollar per gram. Mykala estimated the fish tank filled with the stuff was about 50 liters. So, let’s see… at STP, one mole of an ideal gas takes up about 22.4L… which means they probably used about 3 moles of the stuff. It weighs about 146 grams per mole, sooo that’s north of $450 in sulfur hexafluoride. I guess they don’t skimp for Late Night science demonstrations.