How we did the Rubens Pipe

A few years ago, Adam and Jemmy built Rubens Tube in Mythbusters. It was so spectacular and cool that I really envied them. And now, when the opportunity to build something like that turned up, it was impossible to resist the temptation.

Attempt at writing

We all thought how to start building this structure, and decided to try on a miniature sample. A plastic pipe with a diameter of about a centimeter fell under the arm. Of course, we assumed that it would begin to melt, but for a trial run it should have been enough. To prevent the pipe from melting right away, small pieces of a thin copper tube were inserted into the drilled holes.
')
To one edge of the pipe connected the hose to the gas cylinder.

The second end of the pipe was leaned against the hole for the polyphonic speaker of the iPhone and sealed with clay.

After the gas supply to the pipe with the sound turned off, we got a gas burner.

Immediately after turning on the melody, the fire began to burst out of the pipes to the rhythm of the music, and in places, from the tongues of flame, something wavy appeared.


But after 10 minutes, our pipe began to melt.

Full scale sample

Taking an aluminum pipe with a diameter of 5 cm, they drilled millimeter holes in it through every centimeter.



To connect the hose from the gas cylinder, an adapter was made of a plastic funnel.


They put the adapter on the pipe using a thermal sealant.


We decided to use a column with a 25-watt speaker, comparable to the size of the tube.

Here the funnel counterpart came in handy also as an adapter. With the help of a thermogun hermetically attached a funnel to the dynamics. This glue is a very convenient tool when you need to connect two plastic parts, so that you can then separate them without damage.


After that, we started on the gas cylinder. In the first version of Rubens Pipe, the gas flow was regulated in a curved way, which did not allow for fine tuning. A piezoelectric attachment was attached to our cylinder, but it was not possible to connect a hose to it. I had to put the nozzle into the flow and remake it for our needs.




We leaned the pipe to the speaker, and the other end connected to the gas cylinder.


A laptop was used as a sound wave generator.

After the gas was set on fire.

Adjustment

The most important thing in this whole process is the amount of gas supplied, volume control and selection of sound frequency.

After a few minutes of sampling, we started to see such intelligible images:







To find out the wavelength, it is enough to measure an ordinary ruler of the distance between the peaks.

Fiery light music

And when they turned on the music, it became quite beautiful.



While we rejoiced at this spectacle, we caught fire on a pile of paper lying nearby :) This made us move to a larger room to continue to admire the musical “fireplace”.

Video report

The video more clearly shows the behavior of the fire relative to the sound.



Subscribe to new experiments HI-TESTING can Vkontakte . And you can follow the new experiments on the channel's website.