Aaron Klapheck's Website

• Date I took this class:   Summer 2008
• Teacher:                       Timothy Marbach
• Teacher's site:              http://gaia.ecs.csus.edu/~marbacht
• Grade earned:              A
• Book used:                  Thermodynamics an Engineering Approach ISBN: 0-07-330537-5

Professor Marbach is, overall, a very good teacher.
Marbach teaches the course using the many principals and properties introduced in thermodynamics. Marbach spends most of the class period covering examples of practical problems that engineers are most likely to encounter. Marbach spends little time explaining why and where the thermodynamic equations come from; this is due to the accelerated pace we are covering the subject though because it is summer.
Marbach assigns and collects homework from the text. All those who do the homework should not have a problem passing the course.
Marbach's exams are taken (almost directly) from the home work. His exams are also very similar to his notes.
The Thermodynamics text is required, used in class, homework is assigned from it, and the property tables in the back are essential.

Marbach has created a Wiki space which contains home work assignments, discussion groups, and other course information.

There are some great physics animations demonstrating thermodynamic properties in action.

For you ME students this site contains great animations , from thermodynamics and fluid dynamics to engine animations.

The demonstration involved levitating a magnet above a super conductor.

Boe-Bot Used

Below are pictures of the boe-bot I built and used for part of the demonstration.

For those out there who are interested in electronics and programming I have included the following sections below which should allow you to reproduce your own PS2 controlled Boe-Bot. Note: the code includes control of a ping senor and ping sensor servo which I added onto the Boe-Bot after the demonstration.

• 1. Instructions on how to code the Boe-Bot and the circuit diagrams used.
• 2. The code I used to operate the boe-bot.
• 3. For the improvement on this design see Aaron's Interests page.

Note: In the code section I have interchanged the pin numbers labeling the wheel servos, see link in #4 above for the improved code.

Theory

Two materials are used to demonstrate superconductive levitation. The rare earth metal (Nd2Fe14B) acts as a powerful magnet. The ceramic material (YBa2Cu3O7) acts as a superconductor at a critical temperature of 90K. The demonstration will show the rare earth magnet "floating" on top of the superconductor.
Two properties make superconductive levitation possible. The first is the Meissner effect which is responsible for the repulsive force between the magnet and superconductor. The second is flux pinning which stabilizes the magnet-superconductor system.
Meissner effect : the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor. Below the superconducting transition temperature the specimen became perfectly diamagnetic, canceling all flux inside itself.
Flux pinning : When magnetic field lines are not permitted to move. This occurs when magnetic field lines are trapped in defects in the crystalline structure of the superconductor; defects like grain boundaries.

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