Counter-intuitive AeroFinSim Lite result

[OverTheTop]

Dooh !

If course, that's what resonance is all about, isn't it ?


OT Alert !

Sigh ... nostalgia again !

I miss the old Baird Atomic Differential IR that we ran at a Lube Oil Testing Lab where I worked as an intern in the early 70's.

We eventually got an IBM FTIR in the early 80's which did all the tedius stuff for us but it was very satisfying to be able to filter out the known components in a sample, a little at a time 'by hand' by identifying them in 'the book' ( dang, I've forgotten the name of that 6-inch thick book of IR Scans )

Dr Jordan, my boss, taught me a ton and he was fun to work with on that spectrometer !

-- kjh

Sounds like you are an old-school spectroscopist. Nowadays we design the instruments so you don't need chemistry or physics knowledge to run them and get good answers. They are designed for bus drivers and waiters/waitresses. No, I am not joking.

No 6" book these days. The library is built into the software, and includes deconvolution to split out mixtures in the sample.

Lube sampling is done on Inductively Coupled Plasma spectrometers these days. Our ICP-OES does something like 73 elements in 25 seconds.

 

[kjhambrick]

Sounds like you are an old-school spectroscopist. Nowadays we design the instruments so you don't need chemistry or physics knowledge to run them and get good answers. They are designed for bus drivers and waiters/waitresses. No, I am not joking.

No 6" book these days. The library is built into the software, and includes deconvolution to split out mixtures in the sample.

Lube sampling is done on Inductively Coupled Plasma spectrometers these days. Our ICP-OES does something like 73 elements in 25 seconds.

@OverTheTop --

I was really into spectroscopy in the olden days before I moved from Berkeley to San Diego and left my job at Analysts, Inc.

Too bad, because that was a great job for a college student, but it turned out that the San Francisco Bay Area was not large enough for my ex-wife and I

The job in San Diego did not work out -- the recession of 1987 killed the company -- so I turned into a software developer and now a Linux systems administrator.

Speaking of Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectrometers, we used another Baird Atomic Spectrometer to quantify 'only' 23 metals in Lube Oil samples in 30 seconds.

It was about the size and shape of a grand piano and it exicted the sample with carbon rod and wheel contraption which pulled the oil sample from a stainless steel boat into a carbon arc between the wheel and the rod.

Then there was a prism and an array of photo-multiplier tubes to count photons arriving at specific postitions under the 'piano' which corresponded to the known wave lengths of the atoms we wanted to measure.

Like everything else, I am REALLY behind the times but I still get the concepts because you had to grok the way things worked to keep all the instruments calibrated and running back in the olden days.

A plasma spectrometer sounds amazing -- I imagine the size has been greatly reduced because the wavelengths would be much shorter than the near UV frequencies of the old B.A. instrument !

Enough with the off-topic ruminating ... I am getting all weepy-eyed

Thanks @OverTheTop !

-- kjh