The Wave Machine
By: Julia Banning
1/04/16
For an opportunity to receive extra credit, I constructed my own wave machine out of duct tape, skewers, and gummy bears. The machine was relatively short, but still displayed some neat results. The whole process, including constructing the machine, testing it, taking pictures and videos, and putting together this website took approximately 2 and a half hours.
The Machine
The manufacturing of the machine and preparing the supplies took about an hour. It was interesting to realize that the machine was lopsided, even when the gummy bears were placed at about the same length down the skewer and the skewers were relatively the same distance apart from each other. In order to fix this, I just slid some of the gummy bears on the side that was tilted downwards more towards the tape while I also slid the gummy bears that were on the side that was tilted upwards farther away from the tape.
Testing
I ran several different tests on the machine to discover what kind of waves could be formed. I tapped one end of the skewer that was nearest to the edge of the machine, tapped a skewer in the middle, and tilted the whole machine from a skewer in the middle. If you would like to take a look at the tests, they are located in your email, or I could just show you them in person if that would be better.
Conclusion
Building and testing this wave machine demonstrated how energy can be transferred without actually shifting the gummy bears up or down the skewers, but just by tapping on an end of a single skewer. It displayed different types of waves and if this was built in a larger version, I'm sure the results would be even more spectacular than they are on this small-scaled machine.
References
Bowman, Douglas. Lahs Physics Weebly. Extra Extra. 04 January 2015.