The Stefan-Boltzmann Law Demonstrator Device

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sea_dreamer
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Hello Physics Forum! There's an interesting experiment to verify the Stefan-Boltzmann law using an incandescent lamp. Which treats the filament as an approximate blackbody, approximates that the input power fully goes to the radiating channel (i.e. no conduction or gas loss), measures the filament temperature (comparing the filament resistance to a reference resistance at some known temperature) at various power level, and finally plots the curve. A log-log plot of P and T yields the slope to be ≈4. That is all the experiment is. Like I did in my undergraduate course.

This is a really interesting experiment to me. I did some further "research" and came up with a device, which I named Stefan-Boltzmann Law Demonstrator Device (SB Demon in short!). It uses a PIC microcontroller. This also has an USB HID interface (with a host software) to connect the real world (of lamps and filaments) to the world of PC. The host software has some more data acquisition options and an option to export the data to a Wolfram Mathematica notebook file. And then one can perform various analyses (like plot, linear and non linear regression etc.) to the data in mathematica to analyse a filament lamp properties.

Technically, my device is nothing new, it is simply a special purpose data logger. It's just an addition to the traditional technique. It might help students (like me) to go beyond school/college labs. And for (traditional) physics teachers, it might inspire them to ask the students for innovative techniques as an addition to the general course works.

So, visit http://sbdemon.wordpress.com/" for more about it. Eagerly waiting for your comments/suggestion/remarks etc.

I know those incandescent lamps are quite obsolete now for illuminating (and it should be to save our garden, the Earth), but I think it's a really nice and simple (and "innocent" too:smile:) thing to venture into some interesting physical phenomena. Is not it?
 

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