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Many many questions for you!!!
Posted by Patrick Hothersall on 1/23/2006, 9:46 pm Thank you for creating such an interesting site! I never knew that it was possible to shrink coins in such a fashion. I'm a physics major at Benedictine college in Lisle, so I'm sure you can imagine how enthraling this type of thing is for me. I was curious if you could estimate the cost of electricity for the creation of shrunken coins and the lichtenburg figures? Sincerely, Patrick Hothersall
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Re: Many many questions for you!!!
Posted by Bert Hickman on 1/23/2006, 11:12 pm, in reply to "Many many questions for you!!!" Hello Patrick, Thank you for the kind words, and good luck in your studies. Although we shrink our coins on site, we need to rent "beam time" on a 150 kW commercial electron beam accelerator in order to create Lichtenberg Figures. Let's look at coin crushing first. We use a maximum of about 6,500 joules to shrink coins, and I estimate it takes about 13,000 joules of energy (from the wall plug) to charge the capacitor bank to this level over 30 seconds or so. A joule is a watt-second, and a kilowatt-hour (kwh) is thus 3.6 x 10+6 watt-seconds. Comm-Ed charges their residential customers about 8.275 cents/kwh (worst case summer rate). So, charging the shrinker's capacitor bank only takes about 3.61 x 10-3 kwh, for which Comm-Ed charges me about 0.03 cents. Making Lichtenberg Figures takes much more energy. Although the output of the accelerator is 150 kW, the power consumed by the facility is closer to 300 kW. A typical Lichtenberg Figure may require about one second of exposure time in the electron beam. The overall power consumed during that one second interval is about 300,000 watt-seconds, or about 8.33 x 10-2 kwh. Assuming similar electric rates as above (probably not a good assumption, since large industrial customers pay perhaps a third of the peak residential rates), the electricity cost to make the figure is 0.69 cents. Best regards, Bert
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