# Building a Giant Centrifuge From Scratch

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Tech Ingredients
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQR_CnLJczA
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/42363

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

Hi, today's video is the construction and the operation of our large centrifuge. We have been getting a lot of requests over the last few weeks about posting this video. And originally, we had intended to incorporate with this construction project an application component where we would use the centrifuge on food products, fermentation products, and even water purification, taking advantage of its huge capacity. However, with the holidays and family obligations and the fact that we are currently collaborating with another YouTube channel on a very unusual and very powerful jet engine, we simply haven't had the time to produce that additional content. So rather than making people wait an indefinite period of time for that video, we've decided to release it today. And in addition, one thing I would like to mention is that we have been releasing our videos over the last year on Saturdays at 8:00 a. m. Eastern time and have then followed each of our releases with a live stream that same evening, Saturday evening at 600 p. m. Eastern time. We've gotten some complaints that people found it difficult to watch the video in that short time gap. And so we've made a small modification. We are going to be doing a live stream to follow this video where we can discuss the content and any other topics that you're interested in, but we're going to do it tomorrow evening, Sunday, at 6:00 p. m. Eastern time. So hopefully that will make it a little bit easier for the viewers to participate. So, without further ado, let's get to work. Now, in the upcoming full video, I'm going to show you how we designed, constructed, and finished this large rotor. I'm also going to show you how we did the precision balancing so that this thing doesn't vibrate when it's up at speed. I also did some destructive testing on these bottles, these sample holders, because they're going to be under substantial load. And so we wanted to make sure that they would withstand that. Now the entire rotor assembly is mounted on this strong frame which is securely bolted down to the floor. And what powers the centrifuge is a 1 horsepower 120 volt 1,800 RPM capacitor start motor. With belts and pulleys, we've reduced the speed 2 and 1/2 times. So, it's rotating at about 750 RPM, which works out to about 300 gs of acceleration force. It's pretty significant. What that means is that a sample that sits around on a shelf for a year would have the same kind of sampling that we would see coming out of this centriuge in one day. That's pretty neat. Now, to do the demonstration, what I've done is I prepared a couple of test samples here. I took some of the sake that we made in a video a few months ago and mixed it up and then set it in these two bottles and put the bottles on a shelf for a week. This control is the amount of settling that you see after about a week of settling on the shelf. This bottle I then just shook up before I began filming here so that it was well distributed inside of the bottle. And then to balance that, we have a bottle of water that I'm going to use as a counterwe. Now, it's important when you're doing a centriuge with large loads in large volumes, not to depend on the volume of the water itself. Depending on what's in the water or the density of the water or how many particulates, they can weigh differently. And what a centrifuge cares about is not volume, it's weight. So, if I take the sample that we're going to be spinning and I place it on the scale, it comes out at 750 g. If I take the sample that I'm going to be using as the counterwe, I've adjusted this before I began filming. It's also at 750 g. So, these are balanced. I'm now going to place these into the centriuge. opposite each other. That's very important.

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

And then I have a timer over here. So, I'm going to start the centrifuge. We'll get it running and I'm going to start the timer and we're going to see what it does after a period of time. Ready? Kind of frightened. — Yeah, I know. Were you listening? — Yes, I was. — Did I do okay? — Sounded fine. — Okay. — I want to be a weekend lover. Yeah. I'mma be the best damn lover you got. I want to mess up your covers. Love. I don't want to meet [singing] your mother. Never ever ask me how I've been. Remember why you have my number. — I'm the best thing that has ever happened to you. Turned it off. It gives off a fair amount of wind. Despite the fact that I had uh polished and smoothed everything to make it as low resistance as possible, the outer edge of this thing is traveling at about 150 km an hour. And so even skin friction can generate a fair amount of uh wind flow. That's where most of the drag is coming from. You can see there's a large amount of debris on the bottom. And although we haven't had quite the same amount of settling as we have after a week, we have about the same amount of debris. It looks pretty similar, which is pretty impressive when you think about it. 45 minutes versus one week. Not bad, huh? — We're looking at the Make it breathtaking. — Hey honey. Okay, [snorts] we're nice and smooth, well sanded, cleaned off most of the debris, but it's very difficult to get into some of these pockets to make sure there's no dust that's going to get onto the coating that we're going to put on next. So, we're going to carry this outside. I'm going to blow it completely

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

clean. We're going to get in here and then I'm going to show you a little bit about a neat way to protect and to coat this wood for long-term protection and uh survivability. All right, Al, you ready? — All right, let me open this thing. All right. Why don't you Why don't we come this way? — Yeah. So, I'll take it from here. — All right. Ready? Ready. Okay. [snorts] The interesting thing that I'm going to be doing is applying a finish to do a couple of things. One, it'll make it look nice, but that doesn't actually count. That isn't number one. That's zero. But secondly, the wood can absorb moisture. And if we're going to be uh centrifuging fluids, there's a good chance that we may drop a little bit of liquid on the surface. We don't want it to absorb into the wood. not only destabilizes the wood and can make it soft, but more importantly, it can change the balance of the rotor if one side gets soaked with some liquid. And the second reason is because of air friction. As smooth as this is at full speed, the outer edge of this disc is going to be moving around 150 ft per second or about 50 m/s or about 100 m an hour. And so with both of these large surfaces, bottom and top, moving that fast, the motor is going to be working awfully hard, and it could be working for hours or days. And so it keeps the motor cooler and uses less electricity. Now, I've done finishing on wood projects for many, many years. Typically, either a varnish or a shellac or an epoxy, [snorts] and I discovered a new product. They are not a sponsor. They don't even know that I've ordered this stuff. I ordered it under my own name, paid full price for it. They don't know I'm going to tell you about it. It's called Clean Armor, and it [snorts] has a remarkable number of advantages over these other types of finishing agents. One is there's no odor. If you put your nose right in the bottle, you can kind of detect a smell, but it's extremely faint. This far away, I don't even know that I opened it. That's good because epoxies, they can stink up a room and these other varnishes that have a lot of solvents that get in the air can actually give you a headache after a period of time. So, that can't be good for you. [snorts] The other neat thing about this product is the way it cures. It's 100% solids and until it is exposed to UVA, UV light, basically short or longwave UV light, it [snorts] will not cure. It's one of the reasons why it comes in a black or a dark bottle to prevent any outside light from causing it to cure. The point being, once we apply this, we can apply it slow, fast, we could even take a break halfway through it. Try doing that with a varnish or an epoxy. Half of it's going to cure. It's not going to give you a good finish. [snorts] With this, we can not only apply a good surface coat to this, but then we can wait. If you wait about 10 minutes or so after you've applied this, it's not going to cure. But what happens is any of the brush strokes based on your technique, little bubbles that form, they'll pop, they'll even out, and you get a super smooth, glassy surface. And then when you're good and ready, you need to cure it. Now, the company sells UV lamps for this apparatus, a big apparatus that you have to sort of move across or you have to mount a bunch of UV lights in your building. could cost you $1,000. There's a much better way to cure this. Two or 3 minutes in bright sunlight is plenty and will completely cure this to a glass hard surface. It's going to be hard to beat this. I've used this a couple of times to test for this and I'm floored. So, I would definitely recommend looking up clean armor. And like I said, they're not a sponsor. We didn't get anything for this. This is just honest advice from somebody who's used a product that they

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

like. — [snorts] — So now I'm going to put some of this stuff down. We're going to start with a grain sealer. This is a thicker, more viscous version. And this will tend to give you a much thicker buildup and as a result, a thicker, better armor coating. You can see that it pours sort of like a thin honey, but like I said, absolutely no smell. I can't tell that I poured that in there. That is just overwhelmingly nice. So, let's get going here. [sighs and gasps] And you'll see, even though this stuff is pretty expensive, we're talking like $90 for a bottle. [gasps] The point is when I'm done with this, because it won't evaporate and hasn't cured, I can put the extra back in the bottle if I want to, or at least in another dark bottle, and use every last drop. I can also afford to use super cheap brushes. I don't need super quality brushes to give me a nice streakfree coat because gravity will do that for us. That's a nice touch. Now [snorts] I'm going to do what you're never supposed to do and that I'm going to put my back to the camera, but I got to finish it. [snorts] And be warned that UV light can get in through your windows. So, if you're doing this in a room that's lit, say, from the outside, and you never really thought about the window light, the window will block some of the UVA, especially some of the newer varieties of windows that are actually designed to do that to protect your furniture. But in a shop or something like that where you've got a single pane older window, odds are it's going to transmit enough of the UVA that it could start curing while you're doing this. So, just keep that in mind. Best way to do that without getting a light meter would just be to put a sample on a small piece of wood near one of those windows and see what happens to it over a few minutes or a couple of hours and you'll know if you got to be careful with the main project. Now, except for the fact that it's kind of hot in here, this isn't unpleasant. [sighs] It's a nice working elevation. And you notice I'm not really using very sophisticated skills here for applying this. And you don't need to. It's very forgiving. All right. Now, we're going to give this about 10 minutes to let [snorts] gravity do its magic. and let everything sort of settle. Any bubbles pop, any brush strokes disappear. And the other thing I have to be careful about is when I open the door, I don't want the light to get on this. So, I'm going to put this in a dark spot and I'll be back in about 10 minutes. way below it. — Okay, start the clock. — Okay, this is freaking amazing. I mean, you got to feel this in. — Oh, yeah. — Yeah. It's like you put poly. — Yeah. All right, let's bring it back in. — All right. So this can be easy and it can be tedious [snorts] because there is so little friction

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

slowing this down that even when it sort of seems to stop, it comes back. But ultimately we want to see where it wants to stop because we know obviously that's close to where the heavy point is. And once we've identified that heavy point, then we take a post-it note and we're going to put it at that location and realize we have to add weight to the other side. The back and forth is actually a good indicator that we are in fact not locking up by friction. We are actually locking up by the gravitational field. So, it's pretty clear that the heavy spot is right about here. Okay. Now, the way to balance this, I've got a bunch of washers and some tape. And I have no idea what we're going to need, but I suspect it's going to be pretty small. So that's why I've got so many different diameter washers available as counterweights. And the way to do this is if we know that this is the heavy spot, we're going to bring this to 9:00 and then we're going to have to see what we have to add to 3:00 in order to get it to balance. Actually, no. Let me change that. — [snorts] — I'm going to move this to 3:00 so that I'm over here and I can add the weight. So, we're going to put this over here like this. We know that's the heavy spot. Now, if I stop it, it wants to settle down. That's pretty easy. So, now if I add the big heavy washer, is that too much? No, it isn't. I thought I did a better job. So, let's add some more. Let's try two of these. It's getting close, but still it's surprisingly still heavy there. All right, so we'll add one more. And that's probably too much. So, we're going to have to then go to smaller washers. But we'll see. Okay, so that was too much. so two of these are too much. Let's try adding both of these here as the fix point. And then let's add a smaller washer. See, still heavy on the post-it note side. But if we add the smaller washer, really close, but not quite there. So then two of the smaller washers. a little too much. So then we'll leave one of the smaller washers on the floor and we'll add a really tiny washer. And this should be getting darn close. Sometimes you get lucky. Perfect. So then [snorts] I'm not going to bore you with the tedious detail, but basically I'm going to take those washers, weigh them, and then just fabricate a little clip that has exactly the same amount of weight, and just screw it into the base of one of these blocks. And we should have a balanced setup. Next thing is we're going to put this up on here. I'm going to attach everything, and we're going to finish up the rest of the uh assembly. And I think I'm going to play it safe. I'm just going to do a little sanding to that edge just because once we lift it up, I don't want to have to do it twice. Well, I didn't think it would. No, I

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 27:00) [25:00]

thought we'd have to work on it more. I need to get it in a little bit more. Um, but it should get there. — Uh, why don't you go to the other side for a sec? Like there. And just gentle any effect. — It should go all the way to the weld hitting. — Yeah. So, I hope you enjoyed the video. It was a lot of fun doing it. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the video, we're going to follow up using this centrifuge for a few interesting applications and we'll be getting around to that. In addition, I also mentioned that we're going to be doing a live stream to follow this video tomorrow evening at 6:00 PM Eastern time. So, if you want to talk about the video, you want to complain, you want to compliment us, that's the opportunity to do that. So, thank you very much for watching and please, if you like the videos, subscribe. It really helps the algorithm to promote our videos. And there's been some scuttlebutt recently that apparently it's also very important that if you do like the videos, give us a thumbs up and whether you like them or not, give us a comment. Both of these factors also enhance the algorithm and the distribution of our videos and the growth of our channel to allow us to do more and bigger projects. Furthermore, we also have a Patreon account. And if you really like what we're doing and you want to us to ramp up the frequency and the kinds of projects that we're doing, please, there'll be a listing at the bottom below the video for our Patreon channel and Patre for our Patreon account. And any kind of contributions that you can give, we really appreciate it. We've avoided doing any kind of sponsorships during our videos because we have had the support from Patreon and we'd like to continue to do that. So, thanks for watching. Stay safe, have fun, and we'll see you tomorrow night.