Our Solar System - Fantastic!

JUPITER – SATURN – URANUS – NEPTUNE – EARTH – VENUS – MARS – MERCURY - PLUTO

Our solar system is truly an amazing ‘place’ with its nine planets. It is difficult to quickly relate the size of each planet in relation to the others. I found something fascinating which shows the relative size of each of the planets and also that of our sun – take a look, it is quite fantastic!

Pluto is the smallest being around 1.0% of the earths mass and is comprised of rock (70%) and ice (30%) with a surface temperature of -235 degrees Celsius. At the other extreme, Jupiter is the largest planet and one could fit around 1,317 earths into the same land mass. It is largely comprised of hydrogen with a rocky core. See: http://www.nineplanets.org/

It certainly puts things in perspective and I suppose if you were equally not familiar with the sizes and technical details of our range of acoustic cleaners, then again the following link would help solve this ‘perspective’ question.

Big Band Fan

I am unashamedly a Big Band fan and take every opportunity to attend any such concert in the North of England, especially in Cumbria. You many not know it but there is a magazine especially for us big band fans called Big Band Buddies - follow the link to the website.

A few weeks ago I visited the Sands Centre in Carlisle, Cumbria to hear the UK Glen Miller Orchestra with their leader Ray McVay. Ray is a well known big band personality and for some 11 years fronted the Come Dancing Orchestra on BBC1 TV.

I was thinking about Glenn Miller just now as he was born on March 1, 1904. His parents were Elmer and Mattie Lou Miller and they lived at Clarinda, Iowa. In 1921 he decided to skip his graduation years at Colorado and travelled to Laramie, Wyoming to begin his fantastic musical career which sadly was cut tragically short when the small plane he was travelling to France in, crashed on December 15, 1944.

Glen of course was renowned for playing the trombone. The trombone is a musical instrument of the brass family and like all brass instruments; the sound is produced when the player’s buzzing lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate. The trombone is usually characterized by a telescopic slide with which the player varies the length of the tube to change pitches (frequency). The most frequently encountered trombones — the tenor and bass trombones - are both pitched in B♭. Modern trombones include an extra one metre of tubing which lowers the fundamental pitch or frequency from B♭ to F. The base trombone incorporates wider bore tubing plus two keys to significantly lower the fundamental frequency or pitch. See wikipedia for more information on types of trombones.

These principles of both the design of the various trombones and the method of producing the sound frequencies are exactly the same as those used by Primasonics in the design and construction of both their PAS and GRP ranges of sonic horns. To produce the selected six frequencies between 420 Hz and 60 Hz, we spin stainless steel piping to different lengths each with the characteristic ‘bell’ shape seen at the end of all brass instruments. For example, our highest frequency (420 Hz) sonic horn is the shortest with an approximate length of 380mm and is employed to maintain material flow in the discharge area of silos and hoppers. Read more about silo hopper cleaning.

Our lowest frequency sonic horn (also know as sonic cleaners), has a fundamental frequency of 60 Hz, with a length of over 3 metres and is employed for powerful long distance debonding of ash or any dry powder whether in silos, boilers, electro static precipitators or baghouse filters.

The sound waves emitted from a sonic horn occur when compressed air is passed into the Wave Generator causing the titanium diaphragm to flex.

My next Big Band outing is to see the Sid Lawrence Orchestra at the lovely Theatre By The Lake in Keswick, Cumbria with their very talented musical director Chris Dean, who is also a very skilled trombonist! Go get ‘in the mood’!