Sunday, May 27, 2007

progress on the Low-Friction Carbon Nanotube Bearing Assembly


This was all I managed to complete tonight. I started off the same way, cutting a small piece from Damian's original ring and rebuilding it. I found out that in order for this to work perfectly I needed to deduce the original moiety or else my ring would not be the right size after I extruded it. In hindsight this is pretty obvious. Moiety is a term from chemistry I never encountered in my two semesters, but now I think of it as the unit cell of a crystalline lattice. In this case, the smallest repeating unit of the ring.

Since this ring needs to attach to a carbon nanotube of a specific size, I could tell right away when I was off on the fragment. It took a couple hours, and a serious case of wah-eye*, to find the right piece I needed to rebuild the ring. There was nothing too elegant in this, pretty much trial and error.

I also made the same mistake in the large ring I posted last night, making it way too large. I'll have to fix that too. Lessons learned and all.

Also, I still can't decide which format of picture I like best in QuteMol, so that is why I keep mixing up the graphics standards.

Movement 114 is crunching away on the other computer. I am not expecting anymore freeze ups. I remembered late last night that the other computer did the same thing once while playing Doom 3, so it is something idiosyncratic to that computer.

*wah-eye is a term left over from video games, short for watery eyes from intense monitor looking.


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