Yes, especially since in a vacuum you should have a less arcing, if I am not mistaking. So it's not really intuitive, the higher you are, the closest to a vacuum you should also be... Now I'm curious to know at what altitude are you going to get the longest arcs?
@@Reth_Hard It's a balancing act. The lower the pressure the faster electrons can move but the less likely they are to interact with any particles on the way. The higher the pressure the more particles each electron will interact with but the slower the electron will be moving. If you're interested in learning more, this phenomenon is described by Paschen's Law.
Minutes running an experiment. Hours deploying cameras, launching drones, staging drive-bys, creating spin rigs, building magnet holders, painting wood, editing shots, selecting music..... The quality of this video is amazing !!
Two atoms walk out of a bar. One pats his pockets and says to the other "Hey, I lost an electron in there!". The second atom asks "Are you sure?" and the first replies, "Yeah, I'm positive.".
Then a third atom walks out with one too many electrons and the first atom says "Hey wait a minute! Is that my electron?" But the third atom says "N-no of course not! I got this myself!" The first atom was sceptical but said "Alright but I got my *ion* you."
Scotty, the production quality and presentation clarity here is really, really amazing. Everything you've done over the last year (or two) leading to this point (new place, new content direction, etc) is pretty f'n inspiring. So glad you've planted some roots. Sun's shining. Ready, set GROW! (catch you on twitch soon) 👋
Scotty I had a constant wow expression on my face while watching this. The amount of efforts you have put in this video deserves a salute. I really envy you sometimes for what you do. I wish I could join you.
The high dielectric constant of air is also why aviation spark plug testers have a pressurized chamber for test firing (sparking) spark plugs. A plug may fire well at ambient conditions, but in a piston engine, where pressure is higher, it may not fire well. The pressure chamber more closely emulates the air density inside the piston engine combustion chamber on the compression stroke.
After 5 decades of experience of this issue in engineering design, including avionics, this is the singularly best hands on explanation of the underlying physics at play that I have ever seen to explain the fundamentals that we deal with on a regular basis. This is, in a word, brilliant. Bravo !
But How was the problem solved? I need answers!!! My solutions would be airlocks and putting his lab under pressure, but I don't know how much that would cost... ;)
This happens to magnetos (distributors) on piston aircraft. As the points wear out and create a bigger gap, at high altitudes the spark will jump the gap too soon and even to the incorrect point creating bad misfires to the point that the engine will start to fail. One way around this phenomenon is to pressurize air from a mechanical pump and push it into a sealed magneto creating an environment inside that is more dense as if it were at sea level!
Production quality has IMO always been a strong point with your content, but it's awesome to see that evolve snd be flexible. And still retain and grow the exploratory curiosity at heart ❤️
As an appliance repair tech in Denver, CO I now understand why I have so many board failures on ovens in the mountains. I have had customers complain that "this oven (that I know to be a solid unit) has given us nothing but issues". I always assumed they had "dirty" grid power coming in. Unsteady voltage, that fluctuates a bit, but I always wondered why the inbuilt noise filter, that everybody puts into anything with a board, was so insufficient to protect what it was supposed to protect. A lot of ovens induce voltage for direct spark ignition of the top burners, and even occasionally the oven itself is a spark, but normally an igniter is just a glow plug. (It also controls the valve with its variable temp resistance, but thats a whole 4 paragraphs) Im sadly gonna ruin some rich people's whole week with this information, when I pass along that their 10,000 dollar piece of cooking equipment wasn't designed to be used on a mountaintop.
Great video, much appreciated! Gasoline powered propeller aircraft engine designers and engineers fought with this problem right up through WWII. The problem was that the spark voltage would leak through the wire insulation at high altitudes, 30 thousand feet and higher. The engines were supercharged so that the induction system could operate closer to sea level. At first, pressurizing the magnetos and spark plugs and wires worked, but eventually the high voltage magnetos were replaced with lower voltage ones, and a high voltage coil was attached directly to the spark plugs. And you thought modern automotive engineering came up with that. Lol
The marbles example is what is happening within a Geiger-Muller tube and is the "click" one hears from the field instrument in film and TV Thats an excellent and simple demonstration that I am absolutely going to use to teach future radiotherapy engineering apprentances, thank you SP!
I tried watching this channel a few years ago and could not get into it. Mostly cuz the videos I watched were all vlog style and very long. This format is great. I love the detail, the camera angles and how he breaks it down into fairly simple terms we can all understand. Great video. Will definitely be checking in on this channel more from time to time.
Man, your work is inspiring. Getting to chat with you about your channel and things most people don't notice or think about when interacting with you was fascinating, only to come back and see this video where you clearly spent hours on getting B-roll alone, did your physics homework and constructed a fantastic model for a less-than-intuitive phenomenon.. I officially respect you even more than I did before Scotty. Hope we get to hang out more in the future :)
I wish I could produce or have equipment like his electron flow device. This is where I see online lessons coming to the fore. One well produced lesson cost a lot of time and money but can get to many students. Just imagine if every physics teacher produced ONE great lesson from a year's work. There would be thousands of these lessons available to all students. Instead of each teacher producing thousands of lessons each year for a handful of students.
I studied electronics as a graduate student 2 decades ago. I came across avalanche multiple times, but I never pictured "avalanche" being a literal concept lime you showed in your plug board demo.. You are a good teacher.. Thank you for this video.
I design high voltage equipment and the changes required from sea level to 9k feet are huge. I love the example you did for avalanche. I have had to explain that so many times, and will now keep this video marked just for that example. One other cool thing with shape change using the sharp pin to round ball configuration is to change which side the sharp point is on. The allowable gap is much smaller when the sharp point is positive.
Loved this video Scotty! I was super intrigued watching, because this exact phenomenon has implications in cancer treatment and you explained it so clearly! To calibrate radiation therapy machines, you use an ion chamber to measure the amount of electrons kicked loose by the radiation, which is basically like the two plates in your SEM and you measure the accumulated charge (at a lower voltage to avoid arcing) but like you showed, the election showers you detect change with pressure, so you have to correct for that! You can get really mess up your doses if you don't!!
I've done a lot of prototyping, so I can totally appreciate the time you had to spend to set up and fine tune the awesome demos. Amazing. Very accessible way of showing what's happening. Thanks!
Happy to see you again, Scotty! I'm loving this format of video and the subject matter. EDIT: That was the best integration of a sponsor I may have ever seen at the end of the video. It really is much more fun going back and learning math physics or whatever else when you are actively seeking out that information instead of being required to when you're at school
Your "Townsend avalanche" model explains the effect so nicely. Very impressive! Edit: Also I love the drone shots. So much work is put in this video. Amazing!
I wish I could like this video more than once. Demos and explanations are so awesome and even after multiple college chemistry and physics classes, this has helped increase my understanding of electric fields and electron flow.
Im currently doing my PhD looking at how these plasmas interact with biologics. Your plasma at different voltages, distances and pressures can be found using an equation called paschen's law. It also shows the different gases. Youve an amazing setup there. Would be amazing if you used different gases and show the different colour plasmas.
Years ago when I was in university I had High Voltage labs. Most dangerous labs but soooo satisfying and cool to do. In my opinion the temporary fix and somewhat easy way to solve the altitude problem is to increase pressure inside the workshop. Or you can make something like clean room with higher pressure.
So interesting!! I am studying to becoma a wind turbine service technician and boy is there alot to learn about eletricity. Just when you grasp somthing there is a new law that makes it even harder to understand. Thank you for explaining in such detail and still making it understandable. Have a nice one from Sweden!
This is sooo cool, Im 40 and a visual learner, this simple demo helped me get my head around something so quickly when I had trouble with the way it was taught so many years ago in class.
I was actually thinking a similar thing, Perspex box was my first thought, and then I remembered a fair/show ground Blow Up Worm that you can run around inside of that uses air pressure to keep it inflated.
I'm not sure if i understand all the math involved, but this seems plausible at the moment. When at 7300 feet atmospheric pressure would be around 11.3 psia depending on temperature, if one increased pressure approx 30% to 14.7 psia i think you would be near sea level. If you put the SEM in an airtight pressure vessel. How are you going to operate it. Your gonna need a vessel that YOU and the SEM can be in so one can operate it. Your gonna need something MUCH larger than a bike pump to pressurize this.
If you are interested, D0-160 is a standard document that we use in aerospace to define lighting levels and dives into voltage spacing. Another interesting thing that impacts voltage spacing is age breakdown of the dielectric material. Also you should find out if the manufacturer of the microscope applies conformal coating to their boards like paralyene. This will decrease voltage spacing requirements at altitude.
@@StrangeParts I was wonder if I could count how many times you had to go back for the camera. I gave up later and focused on the explaination 😉. thank you Scotty . barnaclesnerdgasm send his regards.
This is something special. As a person who hates looking at equations, your demonstration in 3D space was inspiring. TIL a lot. Keep this style up, fellow Earthling.
A friend of mine ran a radio and TV transmission site on top of Cheyenne Mountain (9200 feet) in Colorado Springs, and invented a coaxial transmission line filled with argon and a whiff of radioactive krypton-85 to keep it always ready to arc over. Its purpose was to ground out the transmission antenna during a lightning strike to shunt the huge currents around the fragile transmitter. You can flood your SEM with nitrogen (1.15x breakdown) to prevent arcing, or if that doesn't work, SF6 with 3x breakdown.
I never went to college but per your ad for Brilliant, I've been hands-on with electronics from childhood. I've built all sorts of stuff from Tesla coils to an actual cyclotron, and it was obvious to me why the SEM suffered internal arcing while you were describing it. Your explanation illustrated with the marbles nailed it. Just formally studying physics, electronics or whatever does not give you the intuition needed to ask the question the company's CEO did. You literally have to get your hands dirty (and occasionally burned) to really grasp what's going on, Seems to me the quick ad dirty solution is to run it with the electronics under pressure. Shouldn't be too hard to rework the housing to allow that.
Given the density of SF6, the container could have a simple lid, or even an open top. @Chris Sherer, sulfur-hexafluoride is not a «needy» gas. All of it's electrons are strongly bound and demand a huge kick to dislodge.
Great stuff :) I was thinking that another possible solution would be to overpressure your shop a little. Not sure how doable that would be in the space you have, but if it's airtight enough, a fan blowing air in could possibly make a difference.
Amazing work Scotty, my first thought was a possible poor path to earth, as l had something similar happen when working on a high-powered radar during maint, we had to 'water' the workshops earthing point. Due to the fact if it dried out, well Emporer Palpatine disco fingers would quickly happen around all the test equipment, the joys of working in a desert!
Your demo of electrons colliding with atoms reminded me of something I saw on TV a long, long time ago. When nuclear energy was new and they were still exploding atomic bombs over Nevada someone produced a TV show in order to explain what nuclear fission was to the general public. In their show they covered the entire floor of an empty room with the old fashioned mouse traps, each having a ping pong ball set on the snapper. Then they threw in one more ping pong ball, it hit the trigger of a trap and then there were two balls flying. Then 4, then 8 and pretty quickly the whole room exploded with flying ping pong balls. It was a very effective demonstration of runaway nuclear fission and exponential growth for a young kid interested in science like me.
While this is knowledge I've had for awhile now I have never seen it demonstrated more aptly than this. Thank you for creating this content. The world needs a better understanding of how this works. It makes life safer and it goes a long way towards a better future.
This is one of my most favorite videos by you guys. I just love visual representations of our physical reality. Many thanks! Love from the Netherlands.
I was utterly confused because normal SEMs need a vakuum but apparently there are Atmospheric-pressure Scanning Electron Microscopes and you didn't explain that.
Actually thinking this through, I believe his explanation may have been incorrect as to what the actual problem is. The chamber should be at vacuum, however the electronics generating the high voltage could be arcing before the sample chamber.
I’m almost reaching my last year in chemical engineering and the ball bearing demonstration is by far the best visual representation I’ve seen and also so simple that others can create similar demonstrations to teach.
WOW What a nice video really impressive. This is a gem, you took a technical problem broke it down and turned it into something that will stick in peoples brain forever. Nicely done. Isn't it just wonderful that we are able to do such beautiful shots without a big production nowadays, those travel shots added so much to your story keep it up.
Wow that example that you showed was awesome. I learned something new! I didn't realize that's why we SEE the arc (due to the release of a photon when an electron rejoins a positively charged atom). How cool is that?!
Excellent demo model for explaining electrical breakdown. I have a bit of a fetish for high Voltage phenomena and have been playing with it since I was a kid. Now days access to high voltage equipment and components to build with is better than ever. There are a zillion experiments to perform if you have higher Voltages available.
We have a bunch of these SEMs in Fab 42 where I work, but they're enclosed so I can only see the monitor. Really cool to get a glimpse at how they work!
I can rember back when I was a radar tech in the AF working on fighter aircraft radar systems. The voltage for the magnatron was about 20000VDC. The power supply for this used ball soldering to reduce the field strength and was pressurized by the aircraft's pressurization system. I think some of the the waveguides were sealed and filled with an arc resistant gass, perhaps Sulfer Hexaflouride, perhaps something else. Another technique is purring all the high voltage parts in a sealed container and filling it with a transformer oil.
Hey there Cotty Absolutely loved the video! You explained it so well and you had me hooked from the first minute! One thing tho: could you display units in metric as Grady from practical engineering does? I had to constantly convert from feet to meters to get what altitudes you were talking about. Keep up the great work, you got a new subscriber! Greetings from Europe
That B-roll is seriously sexy. Super inspirational.. I have been wanting to upload for quite some time... Always worried about carving my own niche...The more I watch amazing youtubers like yourself, I realize that I should just start uploading because personality should carve it out for me.
That explanation of arks war really eye-opening! I had always assumed that when we see an ark that was the air incandescing from being so hot but I never payed attention what was wrong with that explanation, the color being one of them. Also I would have definitely thought that you would have less arks at lower pressures.
That demonstration was insanely good, I'm actually in awe at how well it explained what I thought would be a more complex topic with that many variables.
This is such a great video. I took a SEM class as part of my required undergrad and this video does a really great job of explaining how and why they work. Sp glad your videos are back!
Really cool stuff. I spent a few weeks storm chasing in that area and saw some amazing light shows out there. This explains why the Rocky Mountains have such intense lightning storms. I thought it had to do with the humidity or lack thereof but yeah, the thinner air means the electrons can travel further and quicker with less impedance caused by the "thicker" air found at lower altitudes. I come from 66 feet off sea level and traveling to Colorado made me feel quite lightheaded and faint for a few days until I got used to it.
Holy heck. The shot composition towards the end was gorgeous. I'm here for the nerd stuff, but I'm staying for the simply fantastic cinematography. The content is as good as when you were in China, but the shot quality is so much better.
This is the first video of yours I've seen. During the driving segment I thought "Huh, that looks like New Mexico", only to find out your based here! Super great to see a creator like you from the 505/575 :)
You don't need to do this however I am glad you did. ;-) Nice and clear video! About the issue, this is one of the reasons IC's are (air-) sealed against contaminants and can be so tiny, the circuits can be so tiny. The outside of an IC is very strong and this problem is no issue. However on the outside, with components and unprotected solder joints (no solder mask) with small spaced contactpoints or (unprotected) traces, it easier to create a spark with high voltage when environmental conditions change. On some high voltage PCB's there are spark gaps for ESD or over voltage protection or to protect against transients on the lines. A (known) solution is to pot it with resin or epoxy or with a layer of it on the PCB's (or components) to make it waterproof and airtight. This will make service on a board or components almost impossible however is very safe. This method is used in military solid applications, air purifiers, (very) high voltage equipment/drivers/coils to avoid any form of environmental contamination. I guess you spotted a design flaw that maybe is caused to save a few dollars on production costs with the hope there will never be a problem when people use it in the range of their cost-effective design. In fact, unsafe to use because of extreemly high voltages. Take a look inside what this clock makes tick. Return it when it is not carefully designed in respect to isolation.
As fascinating as this experiment is, the entire time all I could think was "how much more time is being spent filming these external driving shots???" Great photography work, and great scientific exploration!
This was the most professionally conducted experiment I've ever seen, and you put so much effort into making testing equipment and visual teaching aids like the Townsend Avalanche. Keep it up and you'll become the Bill Nye of TH-cam. :)
That demonstration with the marbles was incredible. Such a clever and straightforward way to explain a complex topic. Keep it up Scotty.
Yes, especially since in a vacuum you should have a less arcing, if I am not mistaking. So it's not really intuitive, the higher you are, the closest to a vacuum you should also be... Now I'm curious to know at what altitude are you going to get the longest arcs?
Did you notice the oxygen atom turned into a hydrogen atom that turned into a nitrogen atom? (Not that it matters really, just noticed it)
@@Reth_Hard It's a balancing act. The lower the pressure the faster electrons can move but the less likely they are to interact with any particles on the way. The higher the pressure the more particles each electron will interact with but the slower the electron will be moving. If you're interested in learning more, this phenomenon is described by Paschen's Law.
i was about to write this exact comment ! - great work
This is exactly the kind of quality learning that I'm here for!
TH-camr: "Hey, your product is arcing every time I turn it on."
Manufacturer: "Dude, you must be high."
:D
Get a tad higher and the discharge problem goes away, alas, so would life at such low pressures.
Minutes running an experiment. Hours deploying cameras, launching drones, staging drive-bys, creating spin rigs, building magnet holders, painting wood, editing shots, selecting music.....
The quality of this video is amazing !!
And all the electron balls he has to put manually in the nitrogen holders, messing them up and start again...
Two atoms walk out of a bar. One pats his pockets and says to the other "Hey, I lost an electron in there!". The second atom asks "Are you sure?" and the first replies, "Yeah, I'm positive.".
0p09
8
I
amazing!
Then a third atom walks out with one too many electrons and the first atom says "Hey wait a minute! Is that my electron?" But the third atom says "N-no of course not! I got this myself!" The first atom was sceptical but said "Alright but I got my *ion* you."
@@gojohnson2511 ROFL!! Now I have a second part to one of my favorite jokes. Thanks!!
Snot: Only fools are positive!
Puke: Are your sure?
Snot: I'm positive....
Scotty, the production quality and presentation clarity here is really, really amazing. Everything you've done over the last year (or two) leading to this point (new place, new content direction, etc) is pretty f'n inspiring. So glad you've planted some roots. Sun's shining. Ready, set GROW! (catch you on twitch soon) 👋
Great explanation and demo.
Scotty I had a constant wow expression on my face while watching this. The amount of efforts you have put in this video deserves a salute. I really envy you sometimes for what you do. I wish I could join you.
Yeah, I subbed because of this video, it was excellent
Same thing here, subbed after this great video!
The high dielectric constant of air is also why aviation spark plug testers have a pressurized chamber for test firing (sparking) spark plugs. A plug may fire well at ambient conditions, but in a piston engine, where pressure is higher, it may not fire well. The pressure chamber more closely emulates the air density inside the piston engine combustion chamber on the compression stroke.
This was bloody brilliant. The way you broke this down was fantastic. The demonstration of the electron flow especially.
After 5 decades of experience of this issue in engineering design, including avionics, this is the singularly best hands on explanation of the underlying physics at play that I have ever seen to explain the fundamentals that we deal with on a regular basis. This is, in a word, brilliant. Bravo !
Haha jeans just casually shotgunned for the whole video. Love this!
Here before it gets pinned
Hey it’s Grady!
i dont get it
But How was the problem solved? I need answers!!!
My solutions would be airlocks and putting his lab under pressure, but I don't know how much that would cost... ;)
@@Gunhed507 Just put the sem in an air tight box and feed it with compressed air to increase pressure, would that be possible?
This happens to magnetos (distributors) on piston aircraft. As the points wear out and create a bigger gap, at high altitudes the spark will jump the gap too soon and even to the incorrect point creating bad misfires to the point that the engine will start to fail. One way around this phenomenon is to pressurize air from a mechanical pump and push it into a sealed magneto creating an environment inside that is more dense as if it were at sea level!
Production quality has IMO always been a strong point with your content, but it's awesome to see that evolve snd be flexible. And still retain and grow the exploratory curiosity at heart ❤️
As an appliance repair tech in Denver, CO I now understand why I have so many board failures on ovens in the mountains.
I have had customers complain that "this oven (that I know to be a solid unit) has given us nothing but issues".
I always assumed they had "dirty" grid power coming in. Unsteady voltage, that fluctuates a bit, but I always wondered why the inbuilt noise filter, that everybody puts into anything with a board, was so insufficient to protect what it was supposed to protect.
A lot of ovens induce voltage for direct spark ignition of the top burners, and even occasionally the oven itself is a spark, but normally an igniter is just a glow plug. (It also controls the valve with its variable temp resistance, but thats a whole 4 paragraphs)
Im sadly gonna ruin some rich people's whole week with this information, when I pass along that their 10,000 dollar piece of cooking equipment wasn't designed to be used on a mountaintop.
Scotty, the production quality and presentation clarity here is really, really amazing.
Great video, much appreciated!
Gasoline powered propeller aircraft engine designers and engineers fought with this problem right up through WWII. The problem was that the spark voltage would leak through the wire insulation at high altitudes, 30 thousand feet and higher. The engines were supercharged so that the induction system could operate closer to sea level. At first, pressurizing the magnetos and spark plugs and wires worked, but eventually the high voltage magnetos were replaced with lower voltage ones, and a high voltage coil was attached directly to the spark plugs. And you thought modern automotive engineering came up with that. Lol
This video is a mix between Cody'sLab and ElectroBOOM!
I like it!
Kind of like Bigclive but without the camera pointing at the bench all the time 😀
This video was like the child of applied science and Cody's lab. :)
Also reminds me of SmarterEveryDay.
@@thany3 BigClive would replace the music with flame interludes.
Needs some styropyro in there to liven it up a bit
The marbles example is what is happening within a Geiger-Muller tube and is the "click" one hears from the field instrument in film and TV
Thats an excellent and simple demonstration that I am absolutely going to use to teach future radiotherapy engineering apprentances, thank you SP!
5: put the SEM in a pressure chamber.
My thoughts exactly lol.
Hop in the pool :thinking:
That would be something that I'll be actually interested in!
That will be the only chance
Next: How to build a room sized pressure chamber
I tried watching this channel a few years ago and could not get into it. Mostly cuz the videos I watched were all vlog style and very long.
This format is great. I love the detail, the camera angles and how he breaks it down into fairly simple terms we can all understand. Great video. Will definitely be checking in on this channel more from time to time.
Love this so much! I am so excited to learn new things everyday and your explanations make it so much easier to follow. Keep it up!
Man, your work is inspiring. Getting to chat with you about your channel and things most people don't notice or think about when interacting with you was fascinating, only to come back and see this video where you clearly spent hours on getting B-roll alone, did your physics homework and constructed a fantastic model for a less-than-intuitive phenomenon.. I officially respect you even more than I did before Scotty. Hope we get to hang out more in the future :)
Wish my highschool physics lessons were like this. Amazing job, Scotty!
Stay healthy and safe, bro! Best wishes from Kyiv, Ukraine!
I wish I could produce or have equipment like his electron flow device. This is where I see online lessons coming to the fore. One well produced lesson cost a lot of time and money but can get to many students. Just imagine if every physics teacher produced ONE great lesson from a year's work. There would be thousands of these lessons available to all students. Instead of each teacher producing thousands of lessons each year for a handful of students.
I studied electronics as a graduate student 2 decades ago. I came across avalanche multiple times, but I never pictured "avalanche" being a literal concept lime you showed in your plug board demo.. You are a good teacher.. Thank you for this video.
Scotty you're a natural teacher. Thank you for the video.
I design high voltage equipment and the changes required from sea level to 9k feet are huge. I love the example you did for avalanche. I have had to explain that so many times, and will now keep this video marked just for that example. One other cool thing with shape change using the sharp pin to round ball configuration is to change which side the sharp point is on. The allowable gap is much smaller when the sharp point is positive.
Loved this video Scotty! I was super intrigued watching, because this exact phenomenon has implications in cancer treatment and you explained it so clearly! To calibrate radiation therapy machines, you use an ion chamber to measure the amount of electrons kicked loose by the radiation, which is basically like the two plates in your SEM and you measure the accumulated charge (at a lower voltage to avoid arcing) but like you showed, the election showers you detect change with pressure, so you have to correct for that! You can get really mess up your doses if you don't!!
I've done a lot of prototyping, so I can totally appreciate the time you had to spend to set up and fine tune the awesome demos. Amazing. Very accessible way of showing what's happening. Thanks!
Good to see you back, love how you explain things so clearly (informative), and the video is absolutely remarkable, love you and your videos Scotty!
Happy to see you again, Scotty!
I'm loving this format of video and the subject matter.
EDIT: That was the best integration of a sponsor I may have ever seen at the end of the video. It really is much more fun going back and learning math physics or whatever else when you are actively seeking out that information instead of being required to when you're at school
Your "Townsend avalanche" model explains the effect so nicely. Very impressive!
Edit:
Also I love the drone shots. So much work is put in this video. Amazing!
That demo...
The explanation...
The production quality...
And that segway. This was just _brilliant_!
I'm sorry this probably threw a spanner in your plans but the resulting video is nothing short of amazing. Can't wait to see what you do next!
duder! so happy your posting again. please keep it coming. we have all missed your videos! videos are top-notch! stay safe my duder!
I wish I could like this video more than once. Demos and explanations are so awesome and even after multiple college chemistry and physics classes, this has helped increase my understanding of electric fields and electron flow.
Try the sales material at these SEM makers, eh? And/or marvel at the power line free skies of NM.
This video is a brilliant and triumphant return! Excited to see what more you can do now!
Im currently doing my PhD looking at how these plasmas interact with biologics.
Your plasma at different voltages, distances and pressures can be found using an equation called paschen's law. It also shows the different gases.
Youve an amazing setup there. Would be amazing if you used different gases and show the different colour plasmas.
Amazing idea... I am wondering would Hydrogen creates light...
@@sajathsalim261
Famous last words...
@@electricaviationchannelvid7863 No problem is it is pure hydrogen. Or, hydrogen without any oxygen.
Absolutely awesome analogy with the marbles! I like how it visualizes the effect of gas pressure and makes it tangible. Very cool demonstration.
Years ago when I was in university I had High Voltage labs. Most dangerous labs but soooo satisfying and cool to do.
In my opinion the temporary fix and somewhat easy way to solve the altitude problem is to increase pressure inside the workshop. Or you can make something like clean room with higher pressure.
Just use a different gas in a sealed chamber. Maybe more nitrogen % ?
Flood the workshop with Nitrogen.
So interesting!! I am studying to becoma a wind turbine service technician and boy is there alot to learn about eletricity. Just when you grasp somthing there is a new law that makes it even harder to understand. Thank you for explaining in such detail and still making it understandable.
Have a nice one from Sweden!
This was really EXCELLENT. This is exactly the type of education our kids need in school. Bravo for doing all this work!
This is sooo cool, Im 40 and a visual learner, this simple demo helped me get my head around something so quickly when I had trouble with the way it was taught so many years ago in class.
Time to build a pressure vessel for your SEM. Good thing it's already compactly built,. A few psi wont require anything crazy.
I was actually thinking a similar thing, Perspex box was my first thought, and then I remembered a fair/show ground Blow Up Worm that you can run around inside of that uses air pressure to keep it inflated.
I'm not sure if i understand all the math involved, but this seems plausible at the moment. When at 7300 feet atmospheric pressure would be around 11.3 psia depending on temperature, if one increased pressure approx 30% to 14.7 psia i think you would be near sea level. If you put the SEM in an airtight pressure vessel. How are you going to operate it. Your gonna need a vessel that YOU and the SEM can be in so one can operate it. Your gonna need something MUCH larger than a bike pump to pressurize this.
Surely there would be a way to either wire the controls or remote control the SEM out of the pressure vessel.
He could also just open it up and apply potting compound to high voltage components
If you are interested, D0-160 is a standard document that we use in aerospace to define lighting levels and dives into voltage spacing. Another interesting thing that impacts voltage spacing is age breakdown of the dielectric material. Also you should find out if the manufacturer of the microscope applies conformal coating to their boards like paralyene. This will decrease voltage spacing requirements at altitude.
Im overwhelming by youtube... In first video from DIY PERKS then exact second one is from my another favourite STRANGE PARTS. Makes my day.
to quote an @anthony peacock "The way you broke this down was fantastic. The demonstration of the electron flow especially." Amazing....
Cool how something like that just flies over your head. Hope it works out! Also I can imagine you running back to get your camera for that outro haha
There was definitely a lot of turning around and driving back for the camera in the second half of this video!
@@StrangeParts One thing that is bugging me: 4mm or 4cm? thank you
@@MrCOPYPASTE It can't be 4cm..
@@StrangeParts I was wonder if I could count how many times you had to go back for the camera.
I gave up later and focused on the explaination 😉.
thank you Scotty .
barnaclesnerdgasm send his regards.
This is something special. As a person who hates looking at equations, your demonstration in 3D space was inspiring. TIL a lot. Keep this style up, fellow Earthling.
So... Does that mean I don't have to go to school anymore?
Because I learned more in this video then in the past year in physics.
I hope your school teaches rigorous lessons 😊
A friend of mine ran a radio and TV transmission site on top of Cheyenne Mountain (9200 feet) in Colorado Springs, and invented a coaxial transmission line filled with argon and a whiff of radioactive krypton-85 to keep it always ready to arc over. Its purpose was to ground out the transmission antenna during a lightning strike to shunt the huge currents around the fragile transmitter.
You can flood your SEM with nitrogen (1.15x breakdown) to prevent arcing, or if that doesn't work, SF6 with 3x breakdown.
Nice to see you again ,👍👍👍👍👍stay safe y’all
I never went to college but per your ad for Brilliant, I've been hands-on with electronics from childhood.
I've built all sorts of stuff from Tesla coils to an actual cyclotron, and it was obvious to me why the SEM suffered internal arcing while you were describing it. Your explanation illustrated with the marbles nailed it.
Just formally studying physics, electronics or whatever does not give you the intuition needed to ask the question the company's CEO did. You literally have to get your hands dirty (and occasionally burned) to really grasp what's going on,
Seems to me the quick ad dirty solution is to run it with the electronics under pressure. Shouldn't be too hard to rework the housing to allow that.
Suggestion: seal the high voltage part and pump in SF6 (sulfur-hexafluoride, a electric insulation gas)
Is sulfur-hexafluoride ionically stable or is it ready to grab onto electrons? You would want a needy gas.
@@chrissherer2047 I don't understand a word you just said...
I think you need to be able to access the high voltage parts in order to put stuff inside the microscope so that wont work sadly.
Given the density of SF6, the container could have a simple lid, or even an open top.
@Chris Sherer, sulfur-hexafluoride is not a «needy» gas. All of it's electrons are strongly bound and demand a huge kick to dislodge.
A good dose of hairspray probably would be enough.
But any kind of pcb coating spray paint would be preferable to harspray.
Great stuff :) I was thinking that another possible solution would be to overpressure your shop a little. Not sure how doable that would be in the space you have, but if it's airtight enough, a fan blowing air in could possibly make a difference.
Amazing work Scotty, my first thought was a possible poor path to earth, as l had something similar happen when working on a high-powered radar during maint, we had to 'water' the workshops earthing point. Due to the fact if it dried out, well Emporer Palpatine disco fingers would quickly happen around all the test equipment, the joys of working in a desert!
Your demo of electrons colliding with atoms reminded me of something I saw on TV a long, long time ago.
When nuclear energy was new and they were still exploding atomic bombs over Nevada someone produced a TV show in order to explain what nuclear fission was to the general public. In their show they covered the entire floor of an empty room with the old fashioned mouse traps, each having a ping pong ball set on the snapper. Then they threw in one more ping pong ball, it hit the trigger of a trap and then there were two balls flying. Then 4, then 8 and pretty quickly the whole room exploded with flying ping pong balls. It was a very effective demonstration of runaway nuclear fission and exponential growth for a young kid interested in science like me.
This helped me understand everything I was confused for weeks thanks great video
Okay there is a lot of potential for growth in this channel Im really glad that you are taking it this direction.
I need to know: how delighted and excited was the CEO to discover an edge case like that through your help?
While this is knowledge I've had for awhile now I have never seen it demonstrated more aptly than this. Thank you for creating this content. The world needs a better understanding of how this works. It makes life safer and it goes a long way towards a better future.
Those high voltage videos are not the same without a Iranian man shocking himself
Electro Go Booom
This is one of my most favorite videos by you guys. I just love visual representations of our physical reality. Many thanks! Love from the Netherlands.
Hey Scotty love the video but could you please add subtitles with metric units for everybody else in the world in the future?
That visual description with the ball bearings was awesome. Excellent way of explaining a complex concept!
5:55 Just slightly flexing the levelness of your workbench, everything just rolls off mine lol
Experience True Level Morty!
Not only the quality of the video is superb, also the place you live in… it’s REALLY beautiful
I was utterly confused because normal SEMs need a vakuum but apparently there are Atmospheric-pressure Scanning Electron Microscopes and you didn't explain that.
HV-generating electronics don't really need vacuum (and discharges would get ridiculous if the vacuum were incomplete)
@@bottlekruiser Yes, what do you want to tell me with that?
@@thesciencefurry that you don't need to evacuate the entire thing, just the chamber with the electron beam
@@bottlekruiser Yes, that's how a normal SEM works.
Actually thinking this through, I believe his explanation may have been incorrect as to what the actual problem is. The chamber should be at vacuum, however the electronics generating the high voltage could be arcing before the sample chamber.
I’m almost reaching my last year in chemical engineering and the ball bearing demonstration is by far the best visual representation I’ve seen and also so simple that others can create similar demonstrations to teach.
4:00 Some of HFT finest, free meters! (used to be free with a coupon)
My favorite part of the video was measuring the voltage and current of the this expensive equipment with the free Harbor Freight multimeter!
WOW What a nice video really impressive.
This is a gem, you took a technical problem broke it down and turned it into something that will stick in peoples brain forever.
Nicely done.
Isn't it just wonderful that we are able to do such beautiful shots without a big production nowadays, those travel shots added so much to your story keep it up.
"this is pretty bad for the machine" *leaves it running*
that's why i watch this channel
Wow that example that you showed was awesome. I learned something new! I didn't realize that's why we SEE the arc (due to the release of a photon when an electron rejoins a positively charged atom). How cool is that?!
This is Brilliant 😏
Excellent demo model for explaining electrical breakdown. I have a bit of a fetish for
high Voltage phenomena and have been playing with it since I was a kid. Now days
access to high voltage equipment and components to build with is better than ever.
There are a zillion experiments to perform if you have higher Voltages available.
5:05 “There’s a little purple glow on the tip”
Probably wise not to refer to the phenomenon by name given the current political atmosphere.
Okay, I give. What is it called?
We have a bunch of these SEMs in Fab 42 where I work, but they're enclosed so I can only see the monitor. Really cool to get a glimpse at how they work!
I can rember back when I was a radar tech in the AF working on fighter aircraft radar systems. The voltage for the magnatron was about 20000VDC. The power supply for this used ball soldering to reduce the field strength and was pressurized by the aircraft's pressurization system. I think some of the the waveguides were sealed and filled with an arc resistant gass, perhaps Sulfer Hexaflouride, perhaps something else. Another technique is purring all the high voltage parts in a sealed container and filling it with a transformer oil.
Hey there Cotty
Absolutely loved the video! You explained it so well and you had me hooked from the first minute!
One thing tho: could you display units in metric as Grady from practical engineering does? I had to constantly convert from feet to meters to get what altitudes you were talking about.
Keep up the great work, you got a new subscriber!
Greetings from Europe
This channel is great! There is obviously a TON of effort in this video and I am surprised I haven't seen it before.
great video man, like usual.. its a perfect example of how u can take a few minutes for prep with a few visuals to really make the video
That B-roll is seriously sexy. Super inspirational.. I have been wanting to upload for quite some time... Always worried about carving my own niche...The more I watch amazing youtubers like yourself, I realize that I should just start uploading because personality should carve it out for me.
I deal with sensitive electronics for my job and you have given me yet another piece of information that will help me with my tech support job!!!
Great video and explanation - so cool to see a popular creator has moved to my state. Looking forward to your future videos!
That explanation of arks war really eye-opening! I had always assumed that when we see an ark that was the air incandescing from being so hot but I never payed attention what was wrong with that explanation, the color being one of them. Also I would have definitely thought that you would have less arks at lower pressures.
That demonstration was insanely good, I'm actually in awe at how well it explained what I thought would be a more complex topic with that many variables.
I really enjoyed watching this video, and loved the production changes. I loved the old style too (Schenzen
This is such a great video. I took a SEM class as part of my required undergrad and this video does a really great job of explaining how and why they work. Sp glad your videos are back!
Genius. The world needs teachers like you in the classrooms.
Really cool stuff. I spent a few weeks storm chasing in that area and saw some amazing light shows out there. This explains why the Rocky Mountains have such intense lightning storms. I thought it had to do with the humidity or lack thereof but yeah, the thinner air means the electrons can travel further and quicker with less impedance caused by the "thicker" air found at lower altitudes.
I come from 66 feet off sea level and traveling to Colorado made me feel quite lightheaded and faint for a few days until I got used to it.
I'm glad to see you again, I noticed that you are in great shape, best wishes
Damn this channel just keeps getting better with each episode, I love the direction you're talking it with the team!!!
Holy heck. The shot composition towards the end was gorgeous. I'm here for the nerd stuff, but I'm staying for the simply fantastic cinematography. The content is as good as when you were in China, but the shot quality is so much better.
This is the first video of yours I've seen. During the driving segment I thought "Huh, that looks like New Mexico", only to find out your based here! Super great to see a creator like you from the 505/575 :)
Respect, you've build working models and the shots are beautiful.
You don't need to do this however I am glad you did. ;-) Nice and clear video!
About the issue, this is one of the reasons IC's are (air-) sealed against contaminants and can be so tiny, the circuits can be so tiny. The outside of an IC is very strong and this problem is no issue. However on the outside, with components and unprotected solder joints (no solder mask) with small spaced contactpoints or (unprotected) traces, it easier to create a spark with high voltage when environmental conditions change. On some high voltage PCB's there are spark gaps for ESD or over voltage protection or to protect against transients on the lines.
A (known) solution is to pot it with resin or epoxy or with a layer of it on the PCB's (or components) to make it waterproof and airtight. This will make service on a board or components almost impossible however is very safe. This method is used in military solid applications, air purifiers, (very) high voltage equipment/drivers/coils to avoid any form of environmental contamination.
I guess you spotted a design flaw that maybe is caused to save a few dollars on production costs with the hope there will never be a problem when people use it in the range of their cost-effective design. In fact, unsafe to use because of extreemly high voltages.
Take a look inside what this clock makes tick. Return it when it is not carefully designed in respect to isolation.
As fascinating as this experiment is, the entire time all I could think was "how much more time is being spent filming these external driving shots???" Great photography work, and great scientific exploration!
Your videos just keep getting better and better!
This was the most professionally conducted experiment I've ever seen, and you put so much effort into making testing equipment and visual teaching aids like the Townsend Avalanche. Keep it up and you'll become the Bill Nye of TH-cam. :)
New format for the channel is working out great. Excited for a steady stream of new content.
I concur. This was a great demo. Thought it was really basic at first but your set up could be arranged to explain all sorts of various conditions.