• Tar_Alcaran
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    19 hours ago

    Wow, dental drills spin stupidly fast. I never realized they’re jamming something in my mouth that makes a turbopump seem sluggish, and that makes the scariest laboratory centrifuge I’ve ever seen blush in shame.

    • Wogi@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      I occasionally run a lathe at work. The big CNC one says it will do 10,000 rpm

      If you ever run it that fast, the jaws will start to separate and the part will come flying out at Mach 4, bounce around the inside of the machine for several minutes, destroying the chuck, all the tooling, and the chip conveyor in the process.

      Another fun fact, these machines go from 5000 rpm (the fastest you’re assuredly safe to run it) to 10 at the snap of a finger and back up again. All of that energy has to go somewhere. So there’s a heat coil, pretty much identical to the one in your oven, that takes all that extra energy. It doesn’t normally get all that hot, but if you’re running a lot of parts with a lot of diameter changes, it can get hot enough to glow.

    • TheOakTree@lemm.ee
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      12 hours ago

      Big centrifuges are quite scary. Think of how much mass they are moving at those speeds. In comparison, a small drillbit turbine being rotated by compressed air seems less scary.

      • Tar_Alcaran
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        57 minutes ago

        The scariest lab centrifuge i’ve personally seen went to something like 100k rpm, and 800,000 g. It’s basically a cartoon safe with a piece of lab equipment inside, because when something fails at 800,000 times the force of gravity, it’s going to end up outside the city borders, or inside the next building over.