qocsuing: Designing Low-Cost Open-Hardware Electromechanical Scientific Equipment

qocsuing

Designing Low-Cost Open-Hardware Electromechanical Scientific Equipment

Scientific experimentation often requires building custom apparatus. However, published results usually focus on the experiment, disregarding technical details of the scientific equipment. Lacking enough information about these custom devices prevents their accurate replication, hindering the experiment reproducibility, which is a fundamental requirement for Open Science. In the field of Geology, custom electromechanical devices with low-speed moving elements are required to analyze scaled-down models of the tectonic deformation processes.Get more news about hardware electromechanical wholesaler,you can vist our website!

In these experiments, the earth crust is modeled with materials whose properties and setup are scrupulously specified to comply with the scale model theory and to have standard and reproducible procedures. Notwithstanding this rigorous characterization, we believe that the moving apparatus has received little attention, implicitly assuming an ideal behavior despite the difficulties of moving uniformly at such slow speeds, which could produce disparities with the natural model. In this paper we address this issue by presenting a device for scientific analogue modeling of contractional and extensional tectonics.

We analyze the challenges and implications of moving at such low speeds, demonstrate its satisfactory performance and provide suggestions for improvement. In addition, the proposed apparatus is not only affordable and relatively easy to build, but also is an open-hardware project that can be replicated, improved or customized, even in other research fields. We hope that this contribution will be beneficial for the scientific and educational community, facilitating the reliability of experiments, the exchange of ideas, and thereby the promotion of Open Science.
The study of the geodynamic processes that govern the structure of the Earth is challenging because these phenomena occur at geological timescales of millions of years. Moreover, there is a wide variety of geological structures and deformation histories covering different scales. Analogue and numerical modeling techniques enable to reproduce aspects of geological processes and link them with a real structure in nature.

Numerical models use computer simulation to solve the complex mathematical equations that describe the geodynamical processes. The increasing computational power and the advancement of numerical algorithms have boosted the performance of numerical methods in Geodynamics, as in all areas of Science and Technology [1]. These computational models have become essential to understand and predict the geodynamic processes [2], [3], [4], [5].

Numerical models are a powerful tool because they allow an easy quantification of the results, relative freedom in material properties and changing the strain during the experiment. However, models with high 3D resolution and large scale deformations cannot be easily developed [2].

On the other hand, analogue models are properly scaled physical models that represent an approximation of natural prototypes [6], [7], [8], [9]. They are appropriate for studying the evolution of 3D structures, providing higher resolution than the numerical models. Although they are experiments with inherent simplifications and restrictions, which are important to consider in the interpretation of the results [2], [10], analogue models enable the understanding of tectonic processes.