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The electrical resistivity of a wire tells us how well the wire material conducts electricity. This is crucial information for any application that involves conducting electricity, including wind turbines, electric vehicles, household electrical goods and computers. Here you can measure the resistivity of wires of different materials and widths, and consider which would be best suited for conducting electricity.
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Electronic materials are crucial to our life today, and electrical ‘resistivity’ tells us how good or poor a material is at conducting electricity.
We use materials with low electrical resistivity to transmit electrical power from generators, across grid distribution networks, and to homes and workplaces for use. Designers of electrical devices rely on knowing the resistivity of wire used in order to calculate the resistance of components.
These devices range in size from enormous machines such as wind turbines or industrial lifting equipment; motors or engines in electric vehicles and all-new electric aircraft; consumer products such as washing machines, hair dryers and ovens; and the nanoscale components within the computer chips found in smart devices, laptops, and mobile phones.
In fact, modern computing is based on controlling the resistivity of semiconductor materials in a type of transistor (known as ‘field effect transistors’ using ‘CMOS’ technology).
Measuring electrical resistivity helps us to understand the properties of materials, to monitor manufacturing processes, and to select the best material for an application.
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Download the file below for the quick guide for the Resistivity of a Wire experiment (requires login) or follow these brief instructions:
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Hooke's law describes how springs respond to having forces applied. This experiment allows you to apply force using weights and measure how springs of different stiffness extend in response. You can calculate the stored elastic potential energy in the springs and even go to different parts of the Solar System to see how changing the strength of gravity changes the weight applied to the springs!
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Stretching – the truth!
You may wonder why we study springs and why questions about stretching springs appear on exams. Sure, springs are used in the world, but are they really so important? Why is it important to know how springs stretch when they are pulled?
Well, first, springs are incredibly useful. When made from elastic materials, such as most metals, springs stretch when pulled and return to their original size when released. They can also be compressed and, again, return to their original size when released. The stretching or compression stores energy that is then returned when the spring is released. This energy storage and return is the key reason springs are useful. Springs use this capability in all sorts of applications, including in high tech areas such as automotive, industrial tools and robotics, to more everyday items such as trampolines, mattresses, children’s play equipment, door handles and retractable pens.
The second reason is that the way that springs respond to force being applied to them (i.e. being pulled or mass added to one end of them) is identical to how materials in general behave. If materials are pulled, then they stretch. The coiled shape of a spring, though, means that the ends tend to move large distances compared to a regular shape of the same material (e.g. a simple rod). This means that studying what happens to springs when they are pulled allows simple measurements to be performed that give us understanding of how all materials behave when they are pulled. Materials behave this way in any application where they have force applied to them, e.g. in construction, vehicles, heart valves, body implants, plants, rocks, furniture, tools, footwear – the list goes on and on. And don’t forget this includes your body too!
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Download the file below for the quick guide for the Hooke's Law experiment (requires login) or follow these brief instructions:
5. To change to a different part of the Solar System:
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Download the file below for full instructions for the Hooke's Law experiment (requires log in).
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Specific heat capacity of solids is important to understand in lots of applications that deal with heat energy and changes in temperature. This experiment allows you to control the electrical heating power applied to a choice of six different materials and measure the rate at which the sample temperature changes. You can then calculate the specific heat capacity of the chosen material. Compare the different materials, investigate the effect of having thermally insulated or uninsulated samples, and see if different heating powers change the measurements.
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There are lots of ways that we use materials that see them change temperature. Some examples include heating systems in buildings (especially storage heaters), simple household appliances such as an iron or an oven, combustion engines in cars, jet engines in aircraft, high speed machines such as drills, and industrial furnaces; however, examples also include applications where the temperature is reduced, for example in refrigerators, freezers and heat sinks, which are used to help cool another component.
A change in a material’s temperature will also result in a change in its heat energy. Different materials, however, will have a different change in heat energy for a given change in temperature.
The material's property we use to show this difference is called specific heat capacity. This property is key to allowing us to understand how components will perform in thermal applications and help us to choose the most appropriate material. If you go to study Physics or Engineering at university you will probably also learn how specific heat capacity values depend on a material’s types of atom, atomic bonding and electrical properties.
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Download the file below for the quick guide for the Specific Heat Capacity: Solids experiment (requires login).
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Understanding the relationship between force, acceleration and mass is key to starting to understand the physics of changing motion. This experiment allows you to change the mass of a tabletop car and the force applied to it before timing how long it takes the car to move various distances. Analysis of your results will allow you to see the relationship between acceleration and force.
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The FlashyScience Acceleration and Force experiment might use a toy car on a table top but the science you can learn from it helps us to understand the world around us, to design all sorts of new vehicles and machines, and even to understand our bodies better.
At the largest of scales, knowing the huge forces involved with galaxies, stars and planets show us how these huge objects move and even how they form. We use our knowledge of force and acceleration to launch objects into space using rockets and to put satellites into stable orbits. This knowledge also allows us to calculate the acceleration of high performance cars (e.g. F1 cars) and aircraft, to design and build machines with moving parts, and to understand the forces parts of our bodies experience through an area of science called biomechanics. Force and acceleration can even be used to measure the mass of atoms and molecules through scientific techniques called mass spectrometry, and help us to understand how atoms interact in gases.
You can see that knowledge of force and acceleration is essential to lots of areas of science, engineering and our lives in general.
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Download the file below for the quick guide for the Acceleration and Force experiment (requires login).
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Density is an 'intrinsic' property of materials and liquids, which means its value doesn't change when the amount of material or liquid changes. This experiment allows you to find the density of various materials with regular and irregular shapes, as well as several liquids, using three methods of determining mass and volume.
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Density is a basic property of materials and liquids. It is important in all sorts of areas of science, engineering and medicine. Density (mass per unit volume) is related to the type of atoms within the material or liquid and how they are arranged. Changing the temperature of a solid or liquid often changes its volume, which also changes its density. Different processing treatments of materials can lock in some of these changes, resulting in materials made of the same atoms but with different densities. Many materials can be ‘porous’ (contain lots of holes) and being able to measure density is a simple way of finding the level of porosity of a material.
The buoyancy of a solid in a liquid depends upon the density of the solid and liquid. Ice floats in liquid water because ice molecules are more widely spaced than those in water, and so the density of ice is lower than that of water.
The density of solids and liquids is also related to a substance’s refractive index and how it interacts with X-rays. For example, your bones are denser than your muscle tissue and so absorb X-rays more; this allows medical images to be created that show the different regions inside your body.
Density is vital to the efficient design of physical objects, particularly for structural and transport applications. There is a huge demand for engineers and materials scientists to create lighter vehicles and aircraft to reduce their power requirements and help reduce our use of fossil fuels.
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Download the file below for the quick guide for the Density of Solids & Liquids experiment (requires login).
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Heat is transmitted by conduction, convection or radiation. This experimental allows you to investigate thermal conduction by measuring the time for thermal energy to pass through different materials.
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The thermal conductivity of materials is hugely important for how we live today.
Thermally-insulating materials are found in lots of places around the home. This includes safety items such as oven gloves or fire blankets and inside ovens and refrigerators to stop them heating or cooling the rest of your kitchen! Your hot water pipes and water heating system will probably have thermal insulation around them to stop unwanted heat loss. Houses and other buildings usually have thermal insulation around them to reduce heat loss when it is cold outside and reduce heat entering when it is very hot outside. This is important as we try to reduce CO2 emissions from energy use as part of our fight against climate change. Insulating materials are also used around industrial furnaces, in refrigerated vehicles and packages (e.g. for transporting food or medical supplies) in aircraft to keep crew and passengers warm in the cold air, and in spacecraft to stop the insides reaching temperature extremes and protecting the spacecraft itself from burning up if it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere.
Thermally-conducting materials are also very important to heating and cooling systems, such as heating elements in kettles and furnaces, radiators, high speed industrial machines and heat-sinks found in electronic devices.
Heat conduction is also really important in many renewable energy technologies, such as solar cells (photovoltaics), which work less efficiently if they heat up, and ‘thermoelectric generators’ (TEGs), which are most efficient if they conduct electricity well but conduct temperature weakly.
This huge range of applications means there is a lot of research and development of materials with new thermal conduction properties. How materials conduct heat is also related to their atomic-scale structure – this means that we can learn about the materials from how they conduct heat and change their structure in order to create new properties that are better suited for particular applications.
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Download the file below for the quick guide for the Thermal Insulation experiment (requires login).
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This experiment allows you to measure the infrared emission from the four different surfaces of a Leslie cube. You can choose which surface to measure, see what happens as temperature changes, and adjust the signal strength by changing the detector position and the level of signal amplification. Advanced activities involve calculations of emissivity, how signal varies with source-detector separation, and the temperature-dependence of infrared emission.
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Any object emits electromagnetic radiation due to having a temperature above absolute zero (about -273.15°C), although different surfaces emit the radiation to different levels. This might seem like a curiosity created just for lab measurements but it has lots of real-world relevance.
The hotter an object is, the stronger this thermal emission is. Objects with different temperatures emit different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum too. Objects close to room temperature (like us!) only emit infrared radiation (‘IR radiation’), which we feel as warmth. Objects at hundreds of degrees Celsius start to emit visible radiation (wavelength from 400 – 700 nm), those at thousands of degrees Celsius emit ultra-violet (UV) radiation (wavelength from 100 – 400 nm), while the hottest objects in the galaxy (e.g. regions around black holes) emit X-ray radiation (wavelengths shorter than 100 nm).
The most important aspect of thermal emission is that life on our planet would not exist without it! Our nearest star, the Sun, is so hot its IR emission reaches across over 140 million kilometres (that’s over 90 million miles) of space to warm our planet. The Sun’s visible light also allows us to see. The Earth’s ozone layer plays an important role in absorbing most of the UV light from the Sun, which would otherwise reach us at harmful levels.
Astronomers also use the thermal emission from other stars and astronomical objects to learn about how they were formed, their lifecycle, and the processes that go on within them.
Climatologists and meteorologists (scientists who study the Earth’s climate and weather) use satellites to map the IR emission of the Earth’s atmosphere and land to help predict future weather events and trends. The surface of the Earth can also be imaged to locate underground heat sources, objects and water flows.
In smaller-scale applications, surface materials are often chosen to help either cool or insulate an object by either maximising or minimising IR emission, depending on what is needed. IR emission is used in some household or industrial heaters and to measure temperature in areas such as industrial manufacturing processes and medical applications, e.g. measuring the temperature of a patient.
‘Thermal imaging’ cameras create images from IR emission for a huge range of applications, including night vision (e.g. for security systems or non-invasive imaging of wild animals), analysing heat sources in electronic circuits, industrial monitoring (e.g. web servers, aircraft engines), and analysing the thermal efficiency of objects from miniature devices to houses.
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Download the file below for the quick guide for the Leslie Cube (IR emission) experiment (requires login).
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Download the files below for activities and associated worksheets for the Leslie Cube (IR emission) experiment (requires login).
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Use either a prism or a hemicylinder of material to discover how light interacts with materials when it pass through of reflects off of materials. You will be able to measure the refraction index of materials along with the angle requried for total internal reflection.
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We use light in all sorts of ways. You are probably using a screen that emits light to read these words now and might be in a room that is lit by artificial light from a lightbulb.
This experiment deals with how light interacts with transparent materials. The fact that you can read this is down to how transparent materials in your eyes interact with and redirect light to create images. If you wear glasses or contact lenses, you are relying on these effects even more!
In fact, there are lots of types of imaging systems that work by redirecting light. These include a wide variety of microscopes and telescopes for making the very small or very large parts of our world and universe visible to us. These work by refracting light through lenses or by reflecting light from mirrors, or a combination of both.
Light scanners use light refraction or reflection in all sorts of applications, from barcode readers to laser display systems to laser machining tools used to process materials.
Vast amounts of information are sent worldwide every minute of every day using packets of light travelling down transparent fibre optic cables. This vital technology depends on how light interacts with interfaces between two types of material. The future might see super-fast all-optical computers that use light to process information.
The way light interacts with a material can also tell us a lot about the material. Lots of scientific techniques use light to probe the nature of all sorts of materials.
The FlashyScience Reflection & Refraction of Light experiment allows you to learn about the way light behaves at surfaces and through transparent materials – this is a great starting point to understanding many of the ways we use light in the world around us!
Download the file below for the quick guide for the Reflection & Refraction of Light experiment (requires login).
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Waves are incredibly important across science, engineering, technology, and medicine. Learning about them from waves on the surface of a liquid is a great way of starting to understand them. Here, you can change the frequency of waves on water and measure their wavelength, and then change to different liquids, use different depths of liquid, and even perform the experiment around the Solar System!
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Most people are familiar with waves on the surface of water from looking at ripples created by, for example, dropping stones into the water. This might seem to have little to do with how we live but this couldn’t be further from the truth – waves are essential for our existence and there is a huge range of applications of them in our world.
Understanding waves on water Is essential for understanding important topics like coastal erosion and how to reduce it, using renewable electricity from wave poower, designing ships, and even calculating the speed of tsunami events.
We find all sorts of other waves, too, though. Light is a kind of electromagnetic wave, together with all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, ultra-violet, X-rays, and even gamma rays. The range of applications from these is immense, and includes, among many other areas, optics (do you wear glasses or contact lenses?), communications, displays, sensors, telescopes and microscopes, imaging techniques, medical diagnostics and therapies, radar, cooking, heating, energy applications, and manufacturing techniques (e.g. laser-selective melting 3D printing), and all sorts of scientific methods of measurements or controlling matter, e.g. measuring the distance between atoms in a material, finding the structure of a protein molecule, or even laser-cooling and trapping of atoms.
The vibrations in materials are waves, too, and these allow us to make all sorts of musical instruments with different sounds. Sound then travels through the air and materials as a wave, and this allows us to design soundscapes and tones using acoustics. These effects also allow sonar to map below the surface of the sea, acoustic imaging to visualise underground structures, and ultrasound imaging to show us inside the human body, for example, to check the health and development of a growing foetus through to visualising damage to a bone joint.
At a larger scale, seismology uses how wave vibrations travel through the Earth to understand its structure and why events like earthquakes happen. Understanding waves then also helps us to design buildings that can withstand earthquakes. Seismology is now even being applied to other planets in the Solar System to understand their structures, too. Believe it or not, the Sun’s surface shows ripples due to pressure waves inside it, and scientists study these to learn more about what happens inside the Sun. And, within the last few years, scientists have detected gravitational waves that travel through the universe!
Zooming back to the smallest scales, atoms and subatomic particles such as electrons often behave like waves (if you continue to study science will learn more about this in the coming years). These properties have been incredibly important for us to understand fundamental physics and have given us new areas of science such as ‘quantum mechanics’. This helps to explain the nature of atoms, how they interact, and why different elements have such different properties – these were huge questions for humankind for centuries. Indeed, all chemistry comes from electrons having wave properties, while the electrical properties of metals, semiconductors, and insulators, as well as most magnetic properties of materials, come from the wave properties of electrons. Today, we’re seeing new technologies based on quantum mechanics, such as unbreakable codes (cryptography) and super-powerful ‘quantum computing'. These same wave properties of electrons lie behind crucial biological processes such as photosynthesis, without which there would be no life on Earth.
What’s great news is that waves have many common properties, whatever type they and wherever they are found.
The FlashyScience Properties of Waves experiment will help you on the first steps of the journey to understand how waves travel and can be used!
Download the file below for the quick guide for the Properties of waves (Ripple tank) experiment (requires login).
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