These lights were 72,000 watts each, with a total of around three-quarters of a million watts of lights in the crash hall. (Almost as as much power as the German sun installation.) High speed cameras need a lot of light.
I've stood in front of one of the lights in protective gear - but the heat still just goes through your body.
The first time the IIHS lights were turned on it blew a power substation 20 miles away.
Slowmo Guys actually have a video detailing some of the challenges of filming in high speed (most of which have to do with light - or lack thereof): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lZvF-YyP0s
I saw the large space simulator (LSS +) at the ESTEC test centre (ESA) a few weeks ago where they can simulate up to eight times the solar intensity (the solar intensity is 10 times as high at Mercury) in their 15m by 10m vacuum chamber using xenon lamps. The surface temperature of the BepiColombo spacecraft due to launch next year will be around 500°C. That was impressive already.
This one does not work inside a vacuum chamber but manages 10,000 times the normal solar radiation with the temperature reaching 3,000°C. Wow!
Synlight is a giant parabola made up of 149 7-kW xenon short-arc lamps... so a total power draw of about 1 MW? That's nuts. Hope they remember to turn it off when they leave the room.
I moved to Jülich in November. There's all sorts of interesting industrial, technological, and scientific research going on here---it's not just the Forschungszentrum and the space agency. Cologne and Aachen aren't far. Worth a look if you're looking for an affordable place in Germany with good access to cities and lots of smart people to start a company.
I didn't live in Livermore, I lived in Berkeley, and though I had a long anticommute I had a better network of people there. I like Germany so far (arrived in November), but I'm more of a city person. I'm looking to move to Cologne, but the rent is too low (although locals say it's very high), the demand is through the roof, and the supply is small. People I've spoken to say a year to find something to your liking isn't out of the ordinary. So I feel isolated, but I'm trying to fix it. But a year out of a three-year postdoc is substantial.
FZJ and LLNL are both astounding places to do science. As a postdoc you don't notice it, but it's harder to do science at LLNL, since their core mission is security. Both places have excellent computational resources and friendly, brilliant people. You definitely notice the machine guns and the culture of security at LLNL, and it can make it difficult to have foreign visitors. It seemed to me that at LLNL / if you have DOE funding generally an inordinate amount of your time is spent justifying and fighting for your funding, whereas the German funding cycle seems to be a lot longer.
The German system of supporting universities by having laboratory scientists responsible for at least 1 course a year is very interesting and healthy, I think. It's also easier to coordinate than it might be in the states where universities aren't all state run. Some US labs have very close connections to universities and often have joint positions (LBL and SLAC spring to mind), but the connections are stronger and obligations greater in Germany, I think.
Do yo know if the ESA does tours of its facilities for the public? We live near Cologne; my sons and I wanted to visit it but was not able to find out if have a visitor centre or not.
Watched a TV clip about this. I was surprised that apparently the control system was programmed by one guy (Dmitrij Laaber). I found a Master Thesis explaining control software for a prototype of this: http://elib.dlr.de/108662/1/Deepak%20Chopra-Master%20Thesis.... (is Deepak Chopra a common name?)
Doesn't surprise me. It's an Engineering and not a software company. Somebody just writes the software, because it needs to be written. When I worked there a couple of years ago, E-Mailing source code files was a well established process. (Depending on the department though)
...and they couldn't be bothered to turn it "on" and have at least one photo in the article.
It's like saying "Bavarian Water Center has constructed the world's largest artificial waterfall" ... and then not bother to show what it looks like when the water is flowing and it is all dammed up.
Natural sunlight on Earth is finicky. They're not talking about the sun itself. They're just using "the sun" as a shorthand for the weather, the rotation of Earth and so on. Humans sometimes do that.
a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”).
Simile; a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid (e.g. as brave as a lion ).
Curiously, that's the line that caught my attention too. Because, solar is so popular but the sun is so 'unreliable' - another case where popular enthusiasm contradicts simple engineering. The sun is a terrible power source, simply because it fails at least half the time everywhere.
For experimentation purposes, the sun is terrible. It doesn't have a fixed, standard output that allows reproducible measurements, you can't dim it to measure effectiveness at various radiation levels etc.
As a power source, it's not that bad: It does need storage and the output level fluctuates, but almost all other power sources need storage as well (fossil fuels before conversion to electricity, which makes things easier, but still) and it does need management. It's certainly harder to handle than other sources, but that's exactly what's being explored right now, even with that setup. Solar power does come with a few upsides as well though: Installations are comparatively easily transportable and independent, don't require grid connection and once in place require steady supplies and doesn't produce and waste .
Solar construction is dominated by energy and finance companies, with large projects in places that don't have subsidies. Popular enthusiasm is barely relevant.
Hm - what's the impact of roof solar in California? My brother's electric rates went from $0.24 per kwh to $0.46 and we suspect its because the power company is recouping its losses from buying all that off-peak rooftop generation at retail rates. So he's installing rooftop solar too, just so he's on the other side of that equation.
relevance: its popular enthusiasm that got the buyback rate set at retail instead of wholesale. Thus fueling a statewide boom in pointless rooftop solar.
Doesn't make sense to me. For the costs to be that significant, net metered kilowatt hours would have to be a huge chunk of their generation, and rooftop solar is smaller than utility solar, which is maybe ~10% of the market, and rooftop doesn't net meter most generation, it consumes it off the grid.
It could well be the case that solar is changing the cost mix and driving up prices, but I doubt net metering is driving that.
But they're related in a strange way: they raise the rates a penny, they have to pay a penny more back to solar at 'retail rates'. So its a funny feedback loop.
These lights were 72,000 watts each, with a total of around three-quarters of a million watts of lights in the crash hall. (Almost as as much power as the German sun installation.) High speed cameras need a lot of light.
I've stood in front of one of the lights in protective gear - but the heat still just goes through your body.
The first time the IIHS lights were turned on it blew a power substation 20 miles away.