Despite mainly being a scienctific project, MARIACHI does have a soft spot for the summer season. And, to celebrate the coming of the summer months, MARIACHI decided to take a page out of director Michael Bay's science fiction thriller, Transformers which will be coming to theatres on July 3, 2007, and build its very own transformer, well sort of.
A transformer, at least the kind used in this experiment, consisted of a small iron ferrite ring with two separate wires wrapped around it. When an electrical current is supplied to the first wire, the magnetic field located in the center of the ferrite ring induces a current in the second wire. This occurrence is the essence of the transformer, and is also the purpose of including its usage in the radar antennae setup.
The purpose of this device is to decouple the wires in the aluminum poles of the antennae. "You decouple something when you want to make two things act as a single unit," said Steven Hick, a physics graduate student at Stony Brook University. "We want to make the two aluminum poles act as one unit. Using a transformer will create a much shorter pathway for the current to travel," he said.
Once the transformers were added to the setup, the antennae was returned to its familiar position outside the physics lab. Since the addition of the new device, the antennae has succesfully been able to detect meteors, airplanes, and lightning, just as it had prior to the insertion of the transformers.
In addition to the use of transformers, the MARIACHI particpants are also going to be using a simulation software that tests the different types of antennae setups and their favorability in terms of measuring cosmic rays. After studying the various scenarios on the computer, it will be time to build the antennae models that are best suited for this experiment.
More information to come...
Return to Summer Science Season 2007
