This project included two parts in which two different setups had to be made. The first was the image capturing setup and the second was the actual imploding cans experimental setup. For convenience all of our materials were placed on a small mobile cart.

In high speed imaging the basic idea behind taking a photo, is that originally one is in the dark with the camera shutter open. When the desired event is occurring a light source goes off and exposing the film media thus capturing the image. For this experiment it was necessary to obtain a multiple image photo. This means that more than one image are super-imposed on each other on a single frame. To do this, the same technique was used but more than one flash goes off as the shutter is open resulting in multiple images on a single frame.

The setup was created by Dr. Winters and his former student (Footnote 1). It allows the user to control how many flashes are going to be used, the interval time between each flash and the delay time of the initial flash.

In this system, a sound trigger system senses a sound and creates a signal and sends this signal to the interface. The interface then sends this message to the computer, who according to the user’s settings (number of flashes, interval time, and delay time), sends a message back to the interface. This message is then relayed to the flash units that are then set off. The whole time this is happening, the camera’s shutter is open and is being exposed to the light. This is a basic explanation of footnote 1.

In this part of the experiment, we tried to create a pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the can. As said in the theory section, we did this by driving out the air, replacing it with water vapor, and the inverting the can in cold water. The water vapor then condensed and the pressure difference was made.

(Note: we initially started with a laser to trigger the flashes but this did not work. We discovered that the laser would not trigger the flash in time so we had to switch to a sound trigger.)

Together:

All of our equipment was on a cart. The cart consisted of a Toshiba laptop, four flash units (Vivitar 283’s), and a trigger system. We used a special program called Intravelometer that Dr. Winters and a former student had programmed (Footnote 1). The program enabled us to set a delay time for the first output. This time was set on a minimum time of .0016 ms. We then set an interval time for our other three outputs ranging from 2.5 ms to 5 ms. We used a sound trigger to set of the four flashes. We hung a microphone from a ring stand that was positioned close to the imploding can. The four flashes were lined up in a successive row, and they each had a different color filter on the flash. We heated the soda can with propane lighter until the water started to boil from the top of the can. We then inverted the soda can using tongs into a plastic box that was filled with some cool water and the sound trigger was triggered immediately after the can started to crush. We had some trouble seeing the plastic box when the lights were off, so we eventually started to use a flashlight