Fermilab used aspirin to detect water leaks in their rings (1979) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Fermilab used aspirin to detect water leaks in their rings (1979) [pdf]

history.fnal.gov

68 pointssohkamyung19 comments

I work at Fermilab. This is still a thing. In fact it is getting difficult to find the uncoated aspirin that dissolves in the same way it did back on the day.

If the originals were uncoated, shouldn't it be very easy to just make your own and make sure it dissolves at exactly the rate you need?

Regardless, always nice to see people using creative low tech solutions to serious problems.

I'm sure a new solution will be adopted some day. The aspirin is likely just a novel cheap and, at the time, easily available solution. Possibly we won't need them in the future because we'll accelerate beam with superconducting rf cavities. Check out the PIP2 project https://pip2.fnal.gov/how-works.html

Wouldn't it be simple (if a little laborious) to crush up the coated aspirin and then use a pill press to make new pills?

You can also just scrape the coating off with a knife or rasp/file.

FYI: I'm willing to do the scraping, just so I can say I work at Fermilab :)

Wait, don't you have problems with vacuum at Fermilab? Or is the leakage on the outside of the cavity?

A friend of mine used to work on US Airforce C-5 Galaxies - the second largest aircraft in the world.

When hunting for pressurization leaks in the cavernous aircraft, they would throw toilet paper rolls into the air, and look for the direction that the streaming toilet paper was sucked.

Once they threw a toilet paper roll, and it was sucked out of the aircraft so quickly that they didn't spot the "leak" location. So they got a blanket, throw that up, and it was gone too...

Was that leak an open cargo door? It doesn’t seems likely that the aircraft would be able to keep the cabin pressurized if there is a “leak” large enough to suck out a blanket.

Testing was conducted on the ground, engines near full power, shoving air into the cargo compartment via bleed air.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleed_air

In this particular case, the "leak" was somewhere in the roof of the aircraft. My friend was laughing about how confused everyone else on the base would have been by seeing a blanket shooting out of the top of the Galaxy.

Fun!

My uncle engineers water reservoirs and a few months ago he took me on a tour of a 45 MegaLiter concrete subterranean reservoir he had engineered. They were in the process of fixing a leak they discovered - using Kool-aid.

After discovering the leak, they gave a scuba diver a flashlight and a plastic bottle filled with bright red Kool-aid powder. The diver squirted the powder at various places around the reservoir and paid attention to where the red dye went, which found the leaks.

I've used red food dye to detect toilet leaks several times in my life. Very useful stuff.

That will give the successor to your plumbing a good scare in a few decades ;).

The aspirin is irrelevant; this worked thanks to the other ingredients making up the bulk of the pill, like powdered cellulose or whatever.

We could conduct a double-blind experiment with a placebo; it would still work. :)

Be sure the Booster rings don't guess your experiment and bias the results!

We regularly use Johnson's baby oil for Particle Imaging Velocimetry (PIV) at my lab, it's cheap ans smells nice. Similarly I once was visiting a certain aerospace institution and they were using Durex gel for assembling a drone...

I'm also impressed at the effort put into the newsletter.. (printed by the GPO weekly it would appear).

Can't stay for long... I gotta run off to the Z-80 'Brown Bagger'.

I wonder if they still meet

Another interesting related story (with a less happy ending): http://www.businessinsider.com/kitty-litter-nuclear-waste-ac...

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