Hello all.

I am fascinated by all this high science and would not decry it for one moment.

During the time I was employed at the Westbury factory I remember how these now items of much interest were often sighted in the the dingy and damp atmosphere of the clients cellar.  Some did bother to just the pendulum swing for regulation by the threaded part of the Invar rod and other who were even more keen used a set of micro-weights that we could supply to set on the top face of the pendulum weight.  Other’s just received occasional adjustment by the NRA lever.

 Jim Meaton, aged 72 and counting.  (Still ironically enough dreaming of my time there as the toolmaker and later as one of the draughtsmen 🙄).

James Meaton

soundhutch@...

On 7 Feb 2020, at 13:30, Bepi <pepicima@...> wrote:

In "Circular error and my pseudo-synchronome" you can see data showing an unexpected relationship between period and amplitude over a large swing range. I was expecting the circular error to show up in all its might.

No experiment can be simpler than this, the recordings refer to winding down free-pendulum data, with the case door open and closed, I'll show those data again later on in this post. Q values of 5,000 and 8,000 respectively.

At the same time we were noticing a large instantaneous frequency shift at opening and closing of the case door, with a time dependence indicating a lack of symmetry of the air resistance, in the "tangent rule" logic. See also the "Effect of open case vs. closed case" topic.

In both experiments I couldn't think of anything else other than aerodynamic causes to explain what I was seeing.

Noticing that my synchronome bob is unexpectedly low density, 6.9 g/cm³, I thought it would have been interesting to test a more aerodynamic, denser, equal weight, bob made of lead (11.3 g/cm³).

Chatting on skype to an excellent mechanic, friend of mine and also a retiree, I asked him how difficult would have been to make a lead bob, in a soft iron skin for magnetic impulsing, and a few days later I got in the mail a very heavy box.

<Pasted Graphic 1.jpg>

We designed it like a cylindrical lens, 59 x 86 x 203 mm, to make it more streamlined and to keep it another 12 mm away from the back wall. My intuition tells me that those 8-10 mm from the back wall of the conventional bob might be responsible for high speed, large turbulence, flows, which means more undesirable effects.

Repeating the free pendulum experiment mentioned earlier I got a clearly different behavior.

 

About the period vs amplitude dependence, with the old cylindrical bob and the door closed I was measuring this:

<Pasted Graphic 3.jpg>

with the new lead bob (the first ramp is with the door closed, the second with the door open):

<Pasted Graphic 7.jpg>

 

Quite a different picture, now the period decreases with a decreasing angle (green bottom trace, left scale), linearly instead of parabolically, but now it decreases instead of increasing. A drop of - 270 μs instead of the predicted - 400 μs (bottom red trace, right scale), an indication that there is something else lurking in the muck. The spring? Case asymmetries? Hidden degrees of freedom? There is not much else to think about.

Energy wise another big difference, Qs roughly double.

Old Q , door closed:

<Pasted Graphic 9.jpg>

Lead bob Q, door closed, hr 0 to 3, door open, hr 3.5 to 7:

<Pasted Graphic 8.jpg>

 

Data are from the same series as above where one can get the angle evolution with time. Typical old Q = 5,000 at 2.5 deg, with the new bob at the same angle Q= 13,000.

Similarly the instantaneous frequency shift when one opens and closes the case door is much reduced with the lead bob, from 80 μs to 20 μs. More experimentation is needed to understand if at case closed, the normal condition for the clock, the "tangent error" associated with this effect is already geometrically optimized or not.

 

 

Lead bob:

<Pasted Graphic 11.jpg>

 

Traditional bob:

<Pasted Graphic 12.jpg>

 

To summarize: the new streamlined lead bob is a lot more efficient than the old cylindrical INVAR (?) one. Not surprisingly it shows also in the power needed to run the clock in steady state at the same angle, it more than halves. With the new bob we lost our cosy flat spot in the period vs angle dependence but we gained a more conventional "circular error" behavior. Still a bad agreement with the simple picture, almost a factor of two smaller than predicted. Of the roughly factor of four reduction in the anomalous period jump at case door opening, more than a factor of two is coming from the more than doubled Q and the remaining is presumably due to a reduced interaction of the new pendulum with the case walls.

A denser bob for the same weight is certainly reducing also the buoyancy error.

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Bepi

On Feb 9, 2020, at 5:39 AM, Bepi <pepicima@...> wrote:



Are you sure 50 mm is the total arc and not half that? Is NZ metric?

Which kind of GPS are you adopting? I just purchased an adafruit module to interface with an arduino. I intend to start to log temp and pressure independently from the clock full time for months to check on their spectral properties for my "intercontinental interferometry" proposal. Incidentally I haven't managed to find better than daily atmospheric pressure, long term, records for italy, I need at least 10 times better.

Arduino works on a 16MHz clock so it can log time intervals with the resolution of its clock inverse period, the 4 μs limit is for the micros function, the easiest to program option. If one wants more there are lot faster, more expensive, arduinos. I would love to get a TCXO arduino, it's certainly possible, one of those situations where it's difficult to make a choice, too many ways to do it and I am next to completely inexperienced about electronics.

This is todays record for my nome, the smaller period fluctuations between 12 and 16 hrs, mid graph, are the night readings, the bottom trace tells you that too, the ramp corresponds to night hours when the heating is off. The SD of the 5 period cycle goes from 2 to 1 μs depending on hour of the day. In daytime the clock senses the traffic in the canal out of my window, only 10-20 m away. One more snag of living in Venice, higher SDs.

With the new lead bob the temp sensitivity has increased by more or less 50%.

It looks to me that your period measurements are integrated with a longer time constant than mine. Incidentally with the higher Q bob a (24h limited like the one shown) full spectrum SD has roughly halved, compared to the cast iron one, everything else kept constant.

<Pasted Graphic.jpg>

Did you compare your different impulsing strategies regularity wise? not easy, it critically depends from what one wants from his clock.

Are you recording the pendulum max speed now? I was imagining you could do that easily triggering from the two rising fronts of the adjacent photo-interrupts, a near to ideal separation for this measurement. From that time interval you can get the swing amplitude right away and the pendulm Q in real time, a critical piece of info, most "intrinsic" clock errors depend on it (impulsing error for ex.).

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Bepi