Saturday, April 23, 2016

UW Engineering Day - Breaking Down Kidney Stones Demo

Today I was volunteered to help run a booth for the UW Engineering day. It was a booth that demonstrated how ultrasound can be used to break down kidney stones (at least that's what I got out of it).

The idea is pretty cool, and it was cool that it can be visualized (the setup was that a plate was submerged into water, and by tuning it so that it was at resonant frequency, the water would ripple and the water would 'jump' out. Obviously, once I took over the demo, I made it really jump :P.

The second part of the demo was to relate this 'jumping' effect to that of being able to break down stones with the vibrations.  For that there were test tubes of rocks, and by putting it near where the jumping of the water occurred, one would see the rocks move, thus completely the demo.

Reminded me of Project Batcape.  It was pretty fun I thought.  At one point, I remember a lady coming over and asking about the 'kidney stone' demo.  Hahaha - guess word got around about the demo.

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