Seismometers and Pickup Coils

Feb 13, 2005 30 Replies

It's definitely positive feedback. If you put a dot of paint 99% of the way down a spring, that point moves 0.99 times as much as the end of the spring does. The superspring replaces the upper 99% of the spring by moving the mounting point of the bottom 1% in just the way the paint dot would move. Negative feedback will effectively shorten the spring.

The limits on the spring length are basically stability and SNR--if your loudspeaker isn't linear enough, it'll oscillate in high-gain regions and have degraded response in low-gain regions. 0.99 is about as high as you want to go, although you could probably do 0.999 if you linearized the speaker really carefully, maybe with its own sensor and feedback loop.

Really low frequency negative feedback (say another factor of 10 lower) will stabilize the operating position of the mass without doing much violence to the system response. Supersprings can have nasty turn-on transients, so you have to be a bit careful designing one, but it's a fun exercise. People have done it using a servomotor and a reel of cable instead of the speaker. You can get a much larger deflection range that way at the price of much more vibration.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

In article , Ian wrote: [..]

The OP could just break down and buy a geophone

-- kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

Sometimes what I (allege that I) feel is like an unbalanced flywheel spinning up and down, as low at 1/2 Hz or so.

But I'm not moving very quickly on this for a variety of reasons related to time, money, logistics, and attention span. I wouldn't actually mind very much if this phenomon stops before I'm ready to build something.

"Is that plutonium on your gums?" "Shut up and kiss me!" -- Marge and Homer Simpson

He might look into that.

"A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination but does not advance our knowledge." -- J. Black, 1803.

Supersprings, folded pendulums, geophones... all sorts of things I didn't know existed. That's what's nice about a group like this.

I'm having a little trouble picturing the superspring. Are you sure it's positive feedback? Feedback is a straight proportionality? If the mass is supposed to stay still and the ground is moving, that would be sense the position of the mass with respect to the ground?

"The average person, during a single day, deposits in his or her underwear an amount of fecal bacteria equal to the weight of a quarter of a peanut." -- Dr. Robert Buckman, Human Wildlife, p119.

Oh, right. When the mass starts to move down, you want to keep moving it down-- longer displacement, longer period. If it were negative, when the mass moves down the spring would move up and pull the mass up with it.

Unfortunately, supersprings are also vehicle suspension, connectors, toys, a theory of black hole thermodynamics... a lot of unrelated hits on Google, and a reference to Rinkler's PhD thesis which I'm sure would cost some money to get. But it doesn't seem so complicated once the idea has already been explained.

And could be made as complicated as you like.

I don't know about servomotors for seismology, but maybe the controlled portion on the short end of a lever arm and the bouncing mass on the long end. A factor of 10 shouldn't be so hard. But I gather supersprings are used for a lot more than seismology. (And I'm not including leaf springs, etc.)

"In any case, don't stress too much--cortisol inhibits muscular hypertrophy. " -- Eric Dodd

Which pole and in relation to which of ?

Best Regards, Mike

Have you considered a head positioning mechanism from a hard drive?

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things)

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On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:21:11 -0500, Active8 wroth:

Someone from southern Italy is a south Italian. Someone from Gdansk in Poland would be a north Pole. Since the population of Gdansk is over 460 thousand, it would be hard to figure out just which north Pole has moved an inch.

Jim

Briefly. But I don't have a dead hard drive laying around, so I didn't try very hard to learn the mechanical characteristics and decide whether they're suitable.

"The main, if not the only, function of the word aether has been to furnish a nominative case to the verb 'to undulate'." -- the Earl of Salisbury, 1894

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