My uncle engineers water reservoirs and a few months ago he took me on a tour of a 45 MegaLiter concrete subterranean reservoir he had engineered. They were in the process of fixing a leak they discovered - using Kool-aid.
After discovering the leak, they gave a scuba diver a flashlight and a plastic bottle filled with bright red Kool-aid powder. The diver squirted the powder at various places around the reservoir and paid attention to where the red dye went, which found the leaks.
A friend of mine used to work on US Airforce C-5 Galaxies - the second largest aircraft in the world.
When hunting for pressurization leaks in the cavernous aircraft, they would throw toilet paper rolls into the air, and look for the direction that the streaming toilet paper was sucked.
Once they threw a toilet paper roll, and it was sucked out of the aircraft so quickly that they didn't spot the "leak" location. So they got a blanket, throw that up, and it was gone too...
Was that leak an open cargo door? It doesn’t seems likely that the aircraft would be able to keep the cabin pressurized if there is a “leak” large enough to suck out a blanket.
In this particular case, the "leak" was somewhere in the roof of the aircraft. My friend was laughing about how confused everyone else on the base would have been by seeing a blanket shooting out of the top of the Galaxy.
I work at Fermilab. This is still a thing. In fact it is getting difficult to find the uncoated aspirin that dissolves in the same way it did back on the day.
I'm sure a new solution will be adopted some day. The aspirin is likely just a novel cheap and, at the time, easily available solution. Possibly we won't need them in the future because we'll accelerate beam with superconducting rf cavities. Check out the PIP2 project https://pip2.fnal.gov/how-works.html
We regularly use Johnson's baby oil for Particle Imaging Velocimetry (PIV) at my lab, it's cheap ans smells nice. Similarly I once was visiting a certain aerospace institution and they were using Durex gel for assembling a drone...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadMy uncle engineers water reservoirs and a few months ago he took me on a tour of a 45 MegaLiter concrete subterranean reservoir he had engineered. They were in the process of fixing a leak they discovered - using Kool-aid.
After discovering the leak, they gave a scuba diver a flashlight and a plastic bottle filled with bright red Kool-aid powder. The diver squirted the powder at various places around the reservoir and paid attention to where the red dye went, which found the leaks.
When hunting for pressurization leaks in the cavernous aircraft, they would throw toilet paper rolls into the air, and look for the direction that the streaming toilet paper was sucked.
Once they threw a toilet paper roll, and it was sucked out of the aircraft so quickly that they didn't spot the "leak" location. So they got a blanket, throw that up, and it was gone too...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleed_air
In this particular case, the "leak" was somewhere in the roof of the aircraft. My friend was laughing about how confused everyone else on the base would have been by seeing a blanket shooting out of the top of the Galaxy.
Can't stay for long... I gotta run off to the Z-80 'Brown Bagger'.
Regardless, always nice to see people using creative low tech solutions to serious problems.
We could conduct a double-blind experiment with a placebo; it would still work. :)