Thursday, January 5, 2012

Thermographic camera for more "band science"




It is a known fact that slingshot bands convert thermical energy into kinetic energy. If you draw out a band and touch it with your upper lip, you can FEEL it is warm. After the shot, the bands return to normal temperatures.

Physically, the heat is generated by inner friction, but also drawn from the environment (air). When the shot falls, this heat is at least in part given back to the environment.

In order to visualize this effect, I have booked two days with a very expensive thermographic camera, the Jenoptic Varioscan 3021 ST.

Here is the data sheet of the device:

Check out the pdf file

The precision is a fraction of a centigrade (0.03 Kelvin), resolution is 360x240. This should be good enough to show the effect.  Of course, I will use it on tubes, tapered and non tapered flats.

Can't wait! Camera should arrive on the 14th of January.

8 comments:

  1. I am stunned with the news. You are reaching deeper and further into the propulsion of sling-shots than probably science has ever gone. You will provide information that probably has never been noted or compared before. The fact that all this effort and expense is for more knowledge to improve sling-shots is very much appreciated and considered inspirational by this wannabe sling-shooter.
    I thank you for what you are about to do and look forward very much to the new information you will bring out. You are a gentleman and a scholar, sir. -- (and it's gonna be sooo cool in living color! :)

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  2. I can only agree with Lord Robere, that's fantastic!!

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  3. Damn, can't believe how fast you gain experience(and spread it with all), and how hard you are working for that. Since i watched one of your first videos i never thought you design slingshots for big companys. And now this. Thanks for all of your work. Thats Awesome. :)

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  4. and I always thought slingshots were as easy as just sticking some tyre inner tube on a fork of some sort, man, I have a lot to learn

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  5. Holy, this is gonna be cool! I never knew that there was heat involved, except for that the temperature of the bands effects their performance.

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  6. Wow, so this involves more than just Mechanical Energy. Let's see, Thermal Energy is actually Kinetic if I remember correctly. Mechanical Energy is Potential Energy. So if I'm thinking well this late at night then our Slingshots are converting one kind of Kinetic energy (movement of Atoms, Heat) to another (bigger movement). This deserves some thought. We Slingshot people may be almost like Einstein or Tesla and not even know it.

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  7. And Slingshot bands work better when warm, I think that might make sense to me now.

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  8. Don't mean to dominate the conversation but maybe the way to extract the most energy from bands would be to warm them before shooting (already invented by Joerg- see youtube) but then it would have a cooling mechanism during the release. I may train a small animal or my wife to dump dry ice on my bands as I shoot as a scientific experiment.

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