Category: Author: Charles Xie
This is the second followup of an earlier blog article “A perfect storm in a cup of salt water?”I did an experiment to investigate the relationship of the salt concentration with the mysterious temperature gradient in a cup of salt water. The experimen…
This is the first followup of the blog article last week “A perfect storm in a cup of salt water?”.Several people including Bob Tinker, John Loosmann, and Einar Berg suggested that it was the evaporation of water that drives the observed persisting tem…
I was bothered by an experiment I did recently about the temperature distribution in a cup of salt solution. I added a few spoons of table salt and baking soda in two cups of water to create two saturated solutions. Then I left them sit there for a few…
Infrared (IR) imaging is a technique for seeing heat based on detecting thermal radiation (mostly IR) an object emits. It used to be a very expensive tool only affordable to guys in military and secret services where money is not a problem.You can now …
I was recently involved in a few pilot field tests in which high school students were challenged to build an energy efficient scale model house. We observed something amazing. Initially, I was worried that students may end up building houses that are s…
Now that you can publish a Molecular Workbench simulation as an applet and embed it on your web page, you may be wondering how you can control it and get data in and out. It may be interesting for web developers who would like to link an existing Flash…
For a while I have been asked whether or not an MW simulation can be made to run directly within a browser page instead of a pop-up window. Several collaborators would like to deploy MW simulations within their web portals or delivery systems. For them…
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) uses numeric methods to study any natural phenomenon and solve any engineering problem related to fluid flow. It has been an indispensable tool for many engineers. Mature, powerful CFD products are available nowadays….
Google SketchUp is a wonderful program that you can use to design 3D structures such as a building WYSIWYG-ly. It offers by far the most advanced user interface for creating 3D objects. Within ten minutes, you can sketch up a simple house with a roof,…
The Molecular Workbench (MW) software offers salient interactive simulations of electrons, atoms, and molecules that explain many phenomena from the microscopic level. What exactly is in a simulation that makes it a better teaching tool than a text boo…