ID Fan Cleaning - Part Of MPM

The cement industry is probably one of the most demanding types of industry when it comes to finding solutions for cleaning and maintenance. The nature of cement as a material is of course the main reason as it easily builds up within plant machinery and readily adheres to surfaces, in turn reducing plant efficiency.

One of the key areas where buildup occurs is on id fan rotors and blades. Traditionally plant engineers have just stopped fans to remove the buildup but with sonic horn technology this needless downtime can be avoided.

In fact, our horns can prevent the buildup from even taking place. That is the beauty of the non-intrusive and 'preventative' approach that using the science of audiosonics offers.

Acoustic cleaner installed on ID fan

This system of cleaning, I'm delighted to say, has fast become recognised as an important part of an MPM program (Monitored Preventative Maintenance) in many cement plants.This page about id fan cleaning explains in more detail how sonic horns are installed on fans and how they work. 

The Sonics Of Space

Sonics and singing ..... the words that form the focus of this post. However, we're not talking about human or even animal voices here. No, this is about singing black holes in outer space!

Interested as I am in all things 'sonic', it was with great fascination and interest that I recently about an unusual astronomical discovery. Apparently, English astronomers at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge have discovered a black hole in a far distant cluster of galaxies (about 250 million light years away) which sings.

The sound waves from the black hole take the form of a single note and are believed to be the lowest sound waves ever detected from an object within our universe. The equipment used to pick up this 'singing black hole' also makes for fascinating reading - the astronomers used a NASA orbiting x-ray telescope that sees the Universe in x-ray light. Now that's what I call innovative technology!

For more on this amazing discovery visit NASA's own page here

More general reading about audiosonic science and acoustic frequencies visit our own web page here.

Sonic Movies This Christmas

Sonic movies ... now there's a thought! As regular readers of my sonic horns blog will know, I am passionate about the science of audiosonics and indeed everything on the periphery of the subject. It's not surprising therefore that I sit up and take notice when I watch a movie that has any 'sonic' connection.

It's to a movie that I actually owe a debt of gratitude for sparking my interest in sonic horn technology - On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with George Lazenby and Diana Rigg. It was the sequence where Blofeld (played by Telly Savalas) fired a signal rocket whilst Bond was on a ski slope and the sound waves that it generated created an avalanche. See this 'material debonding' effect as I now call it, ignited a fascination with sound that has dominated my life.

So what's this to do with Christmas? Well, over the holidays many people like to relax with friends or family and watch a good, entertaining movie. So 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' is one I can recommend :-)

It doesn't end there though because there are plenty of other great movies which feature sonics in some way. There's the Indiana Jones movie series. Yep, they have a sonic association in every single one of the 4 movies made so far! It's Indy's bullwhip of course when he unleashes it to ward off attackers. The crack that a bullwhip makes is actually a sonic boom. The end of the whip has been proven to move faster than the speed of sound and in accordance with the formula for kinetic energy, it generates a definitive sonic boom! For the formual and more info see the sonic boom Wiki page.

Maybe because of its dynamics, the whip is featured in many movies including yet more notable ones such as the 1998 movie The Mask of Zorro starring Antonio Banderas and Anthony Hopkins. What's funny is that in reading up on the movie on imdb.com a photo came up showing guess who? Antonio Banderas and Harrison Ford together! Check it out here.  Co-incidence? Maybe, or perhaps the sonic element of their most famous roles just drew them together unwittingly!

Whatever your movie tastes, there's hopefully at least one of the three I've mentioned above that will appeal to you this Christmas. Don't anyone ever tell me that sonics can't be fun!

Crank It Up This Thanksgiving

<sup>Today is the start of Thanksgiving in the United States where it has been an officially designated holiday for a long time - since 1863 in fact when it started out as a way of celebrating the year's harvest. It's a time when people look back and reflect upon the good things in life and give thanks.

Many people also stop to think back to the first Pilgrims who landed on the shores of North America - a different time and a very different world from what we have today. It's history with a meaning that still lives on today.

I love history and I suppose what you would call 'old-fashioned' things. Take for example this old crank horn.</sup> 

<sup>It was made by a skilled craftsman around 1880 to the early 1900s. Being over 100 years old, it is a definitive 'antique'. With my fascination for audiosonics and acoustic technology, this old crank horn has special meaning. 

A century ago, there were no sonic horns such as I supply today through www.sonic-horns.com but there was a need for sound technology of a different kind - at sea. It was designed for use by yachts and the instructions tell you how many blasts and of what duration you need to give depending upon your situation. Using only basic technology this piece of equipment still works and we measured the level of blast that it's still capable of - up to 122-125 dBA. Quite incredible! 

This old crank horn is also important to me beause it is part of the chain of events that led up to the development of today's sophisticated acoustic technology. Without the work of the pioneers in the early days of acoustic science, we could not do what we do today. So today I would like to give my thanks to them.</sup> 

Sonic Horns Fun

When you're involved with sonic horns and the science of sonic cleaning, you can become so engrossed with, what is after all a fascinating subject, that you begin to see everyday objects in a different way.

Here are two examples ...

Art Exhibition - entitled "Underwater" you could not possibly have imagined a connection with sonic horns BUT there was! Read my artistic sonic horns post previously published on this blog.

Children's Play Area - a recent walk through one of Cumbria's city parks stopped me in my tracks. I had unwittingly entered a recently developed section with a variety of novel interactive displays, clearly designed to attract the attention of the younger generation. Amongst them were 2 metal horns set up several feet apart, offering an experiment in sound wave transmission.

What great fun! I know how I would have reacted if I had seen this as a boy!

Who knows, it might just inspire one or two children to delve further into the science of acoustics and become sonic horn experts in years to come! I live in hope :)