Fixing Furnaces

11/30/12

Heather was back this week and spent the day with Daniele and I. We hopped right to work as we headed to the room where they kept the furnaces in hopes of fixing a furnace that had been out of service for a few weeks now. The furnaces are humerously named after the three stooges (Moe, Larry, Shemp and Curly) along with the Marx brothers (Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo). I was a little apprehensive, as fixing a machine that can easily heat up to 1100 degrees Celsius seemed to be a difficult task to say the least even though I did like their names. Daniele on the other hand seemed to think the furnace was anything but scary as she compared it to a high power toaster as we started to fix it. The furnace consists of a ceramic tube with a coil of wire wrapped around it. What often causes the furnaces to stop working is the coils of the wire will bend and touch each other, causing the furnace to short out since it produces heat using electrical energy. Insulation is then wrapped around the wire and tube and a thermocouple is tucked inside the insulation. The thermocouple gets hooked up to a monitor beneath the furnace and measures the temperature within the furnace. After sufficiently insulating the furnace and stuffing our contraption into its stand, it was ready to roll. We attached the wires to the electricity (double checking to make sure the furnace was switched off first) and the wires from the thermocouple to the monitor. The trick to matching up the wires is that the wire that hooks up with the red wire is magnetic. There is a little magnet next to the furnaces to ensure you are hooking up the right wires. We then turned on the furnace and to our delight it worked. Daniele had made a capsule while I was at Thanksgiving break and we put it in the furnace at a toasty 700 degrees.
With the furnace up and running, Daniele and Heather decided to show me how to make wires for a thermocouple. Daniele helped me cut two different types of wires to an appropriate length and then showed me how to cross the wires, forming a little "x" where the wires overlapped. A small machine would send a pulse of electricity through an electrode which would heat and seal the middle of the "x" where the two wires crossed one another together. Daniele easily lined up the minuscule center of the "x" on the tiny electrode and easily fused the two, then flipping it over to securely seal the other side. Then it was my turn. For some reason, my hand eye coordination was simply not on par and I could not line up the tiny "x" with the electrode to save my life. It got to the point where we had to stop and sand down the electrode because the build up from the wires was preventing the spark from even having a hope of fusing the two wires even if I could get my aim on target. After a few more tries, my persistence paid off and I successfully fused two sets of wires.
Daniele is going to a conference in San Francisco this week, but will be back in time for my internship next week even though Heather will still be gone. Hopefully we'll be able to take out our capsule and make a new one for another trial of our experiment.