Links to Educational Resources
Here are some places to go for further information and resources,
not necessarily vacuum specific
All links were checked and updated as of 27 December, 2007. Please report dead links, changes or recommended additions.
Vacuum & Related Topics
The American Vacuum Society's Vacuum Science & Technology Timeline: 1500-2007 has been updated and is online. Be sure to carefully check out the period 1972 to 2007.
Roy Schmaus at the University of Alberta has an interesting site covering a variety of topics including vacuum.
A number of Surface Science Resources are listed by McAllister Technical Services, a manufacturer of surface analytical instruments. Be sure to check out A Short History of Vacuum Terminology and Technology, a nice set of tidbits that has been produced by McAllister.
Phil Danielson of The Vacuum Lab, “A journal of practical and useful vacuum technology,” has a number of excellent articles (21 at the moment) and reviews of current vacuum books at his site.
The Education Committee of the American Vacuum Society has an interesting publication Low Pressure Experiments & Modelling for High School Science Curricula. See also the Education Committee's Science Educator Workshop page for more information on the outreach work of this group. Finally, check out the AVS' listing of reasonably priced technical monographs.
Please be sure to visit Henk Dijkstra's beautiful and informative Cathode Ray Tube site.Nyle Steiner (who has prepared a couple of articles for the Bell Jar) has developed a nice site, SparkBangBuzz. Be sure to check out the miniature cathode ray tubes.
Educational Products and Resources
The Science Source of Waldoboro, Maine is in the process of introducing an economical vacuum educational system, the Vacuum Process & Applications Laboratory - Advanced (VPAL-A). This expandable teaching system is intended for technical college and undergraduate level use. The VPAL-A comes with a manifold with inlet leak & isolation valves, Bourdon & wide-range Pirani gauges, plastic chamber with electrical feedthroughs, glass chamber for low pressure exercises, 6 cfm mechanical pump and full documentation. Optional accessory kits currently include Vernier datalogging hardware & software for data capture, a 50 sccm mass flow controller and a package of equipment for plasma and dc sputtering exercises.
Exercises that may be performed with the VPAL-A include vacuum system baseline characterization, pumpdown time constant, absolute and atmosphere pressure references, characteristics of direct and indirect vacuum gauges, mass flow measurement & control, pressure control principles, real and virtual leaks, permeation, outgassing, evaporative cooling, mean free path, the glow discharge and sputter deposition of metals. Please examine the complete brochure.
The Science Source is also developing a low cost vacuum tool (VPAL-Basic) that is targeted to the high school and middle school levels.
For more information on these products email The Science Source.
MKS Instruments offers a high end line of vacuum training products and instruction materials that are used by technical colleges and industry. The centerpiece product is the VTS-1B Vacuum Training System. The site operated by the Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center (MATEC) contains information on the various exercises that can be performed with this system.
For an overview of vacuum training programs for industry, a good overview is provided by an article that appeared recently in Vacuum Coating & Technology magazine. Click here to view or download Vacuum Training for Manufacturing: Why and How. (815k, Acrobat PDF).
Amateur Science Organizations
Shawn Carlson’s The Society for Amateur Scientists actively promotes amateur science and amateur-professional collaborations in all areas of science.
On Line Courses
Prof. Walter Lewin of MIT has a wonderful set of 39 free on line physics lectures. These are in RealPlayer format and can be viewed using the RealOneTM player software via MIT 's OpenCourseWare site. Be sure to check out the other course offerings (about 1800 at the moment).
Other Science & Technology Links
Bill Beaty’s Science Hobbyist Home Page has a wonderful selection of links to a wide variety of interesting science resources. And a few suspect ones too.
Don Lancaster’s Guru’s Lair is a wide-ranging technical support service for readers of his various print columns.
Professional Societies
The Society of Vacuum Coaters. The SVC has some excellent publications on line including Don Mattox' The Foundations of Vacuum Coating Technology and several historical papers concerning vacuum coating processes and procedures.
The Institute of Physics. Many of IOP's electronic journals have articles that are available for free for a limited period of time.
Plasma Devices
There is a network of small (3 kJ) plasma focus devices that are in use by a number of institutions in the developing world. These are under the sponsorship of the UN University/International Centre for Theoretical Physics Plasma Fusion Facility (UNU/ICTP PFF). A summary of the first 12 years of the program (1986-1998) is available at this link. Small plasma focus devices such as this are within the capabilities of a determined amateur. There is an open access archive for ICTP papers by discipline and country. To quickly reach the key papers, start with "Asia/Pacific" then "Science" followed by "Physics." Then view the lists for Malaysia and Singapore. This program has to count as one of very few useful UN sponsored efforts that I've ever heard of.
The Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel maintains a page for the WIS Plasma Laboratory. There is also a good assortment of relevant links.
The Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, a table-top inertial confinement fusion device, has received considerable coverage in tBJ mostly as a result of Richard Hull and his network of collaborators. Their Open Source Fusor Research Consortium also has many links and a lively forum.
Monitoring the Solar-Terrestrial Environment (VLF/ELF Radio and Magnetometry)
The INSPIRE Project. INSPIRE (Interactive NASA Space Physics Ionosphere Radio Experiments) is an amateur/professional collaboration involving the investigation of very low frequency (audio range) radio waves in the earth’s magnetosphere. Many INSPIRE participants are high school students and the group provides very simple, inexpensive kits for receiving the signals. The Web site has audio files of whistlers and other atmospherics and a link to an on-line sferics receiver.
Steve McGreevy’s Natural VLF Radio Phenomena page has a tremendous amount of background material on sferics as well as audio files and audio CDs. He also supplies an excellent sferics receiver.
Shawn Korgan moderates an excellent VLF Discussion Group that has an active base of about 300 members.
Richard Horne’s Spectrogram is an excellent general purpose shareware program for audio analysis with a PC. For natural radio, be sure to check out "Spectrum Lab" at DL4YHF's Amateur Radio Software. Spectrum Lab, a freeware program, includes a multitude of options including mixers and filters. Newly incorporated is a 50 or 60 Hz hum filter that makes suburban natural radio listening practical.
Another valuable resource is the Very Low Frequency Group Home Page. Anyone who has examined the VLF literature will know R.A. Helliwell and this is the Web site for the group he created in the 1950s at Stanford.
NOAA’s Space Environment Center has up to the minute solar-terrestrial data. Also available are daily solar images from observatories around the world.
Other solar-terrestrial resources include Spaceweather.com and NOAA’s weekly Preliminary Report & Forecast of Solar Geophysical Data.
Another good site for information on VLF/ELF amateur research is Radio Waves Below 22kHz.
The American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) has sponsored a longstanding network of people who monitor solar flares by the indirect sudden ionospheric disturbance (SID) method. Information on this program can be found here.
The University of Oulu in Finland operates the WWW Virtual Library for Aeronomy, Solar-Terrestrial Physics and Chemistry. That says it all.
Erich Kern of Fat Quarters Software carries the line of Speake & Co. fluxgate magnetometers that can be used for geophysical monitoring. Erich also carries kits and ICs for the necessary electronics that are associated with the sensors.
Shakes and Quakes in the Earth and Atmosphere
The Redwood City Public Seismic Network is a wonderful resource for the amateur seismologist. Interactions through the mail list, data collection & analysis hardware and software, seismometer designs (tried & true as well as experimental) are all here. While I don’t have an operational seismograph, I do use Larry’s WinSDR software and 8-channel A/D with my VLF receivers, microbarograph and other monitoring instruments.
Earthquake data, seismograms and descriptions of research programs can be obtained from sites operated by the Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory.
The atmosphere also exhibits very small pressure variations at subsonic frequencies. Called Infrasound, the low frequency audio spectrum (0.01 to 5 Hz) is monitored to detect nuclear explosions. Infrasound also arises from meteors when they strike the atmosphere. The origins of many of these signals are uncertain, therefore the study of these disturbances could be an interesting pursuit. Monitoring devices are sensitive differential pressure sensors: capacitor microphones, capacitance manometers and even loudspeakers have been used. Infrasound Monitoring with a Microbarograph has information on this topic as well as details on the construction of a sensitive apparatus. This article describes my first generation instrument. A 4th iteration is in the works and will be reported on soon. Some professional resources on infrasound and microbarographs can be found at Chris Hayward’s site at So. Methodist University. This has detailed information on the microbarograph that he has developed. Some of its features are going into my 4th generation instrument.
Patents
The US Patent and Trademark Office now has full text and/or patent document images back to the first patent, searchable, printable and free.
Good Organizations
Here are some worthy charities and organizations that do useful work and make good use of contributions:
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