Getting Started

[Sivakant Gopi]

Hello everyone

 In our last few meetings we have decided on these topics:

1. Mechanical Calculator: The aim is to do some operations like addition, multiplication, exponentiation mechanically. Fun project, but it will be difficult to get the parts we require. Making the parts on our own is not viable.

2. Wireless Communication: Establish a wireless communication link between two nearby places. A reasonable project. Looks achievable. 

3. Electro-Mechanical Battery: Design a battery which doesn't store energy in chemical form. It should store sufficient energy and should act as a steady power source and should be able to at least light a bulb. Useful and interesting, but no one seems to have any idea.

4. Salt separation from water: Separate salt from salt water. The purpose is to purify water and therefore the value should be seen as the pure water produced per unit cost per unit time. Ordinary methods like boiling, evaporation, freezing are either too slow or too costly. Highly ambitious with huge potential. Seems very difficult.

5. Capturing sunlight with water bottles: Everybody might have seen the video of this being used in Indonesia. Our task is to optimize the shape and size of the bottles to capture the maximum light for most part of the day. This is the easiest of all, since this is basically an optimization problem in optics and is purely theoretical.

6. Finding h or c or G: Design original experiments to find planck's constant h, light speed c or gravitational constant G. We can get a taste of experimental physics from this project. 

We have to reach consensus soon and start working. You can discuss on this thread about your views. If we cannot reach consensus by rational arguments, we will go for a vote.

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kant

[Pavan Govindaraju Bharadwaj]

Where is Page Turning Mechansim?

[Sivakant Gopi]

@Pavan: Sorry, why don't you explain about it?

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[Arpan Saha]

But hbar = c = 1. G may be compared with other mass scales like proton mass etc.
Electromechanical battery: We can fix a coil on those toys that require winding.

I think the website for the Clock of Long Now is a good place for inspiration for things electromechanical.

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Arpan Saha | Junior Undergraduate | Department of Physics | IIT Bombay

http://arpansaha.wordpress.com/

[Arpan Saha]

And the state of the art process for desalination is reverse osmosis.
I was wondering, can we form a precipitate out of NaCl and anything else?