There was a time when making a cloud chamber with dry ice and alcohol was one of those ‘rite of passage’ type science projects every nerdy child did. That time may or may not be passed, but we doubt many children are making cloud chambers quite like [Curious Scientist]’s 20 cm x 20 cm Peltier-powered desktop unit.
The dimensions were dictated by the size of the off-the-shelf display case which serves as the chamber, but conveniently enough also allows emplacement of four TEC2-19006 Peltier cooling modules. These are actually “stacked” modules, containing two thermoelectric elements in series — a good thing, since the heat delta required to make a cloud chamber is too great for a single element. Using a single-piece two stage module simplifies the build considerably compared to stacking elements manually.
To carry away all that heat, [Curious Scientist] first tried heatpipe-based CPU coolers, but moved on to CPU water blocks for a quieter, more efficient solution. Using desktop coolers means almost every part here is off the shelf, and it all combines to work as well as we remember the dry-ice version. Like that childhood experiment, there doesn’t seem to be any provision for recycling the condensed alcohol, so eventually the machine will peter out after enough vapor is condensed.
This style of detector isn’t terribly sensitive and so needs to be “seeded” with spicy rocks to see anything interesting, unless an external electric field is applied to encourage nucleation around weaker ion trails. Right now [Curious Scientist] is doing that by rubbing the glass with microfiber to add some static electricity, but if there’s another version, it will have a more hands-off solution.
We’ve seen Peltier-Powered cloud chambers before (albeit without PC parts), but the “dry ice and alcohol” hack is still a going concern. If even that’s too much effort, you could just go make a cup of tea, and watch very, very carefully.
Eh, cloud TANKS are much more visually interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RypKl8MJPRE
Cloud tanks are awesome visual special effects. Just like dumping cold creamer into hot coffee.
But if you’re after a Nobel Prize for inventing the apparatus that allowed us to see more than a couple new fundamental particles, I’d go with cloud chambers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._T._R._Wilson
Inspired by a childhood reading of CL Stong’s great book, I recently made some dry-ice and alcohol cloud chambers: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search?q=Cloud+Chamber
I got to see this in person at OpenSauce in July. It was super impressive and easily one of the coolest things at the show, which is saying a lot.
When I worked at a science centre, my favourite thing to do was ambush people hypnotized by our cloud chamber display and talk particle physics at them.
Thanks for sharing my work. In the meantime, I started working on a better high-voltage grid solution using a battery-operated fly swatter. I will make an update video on the topic but I want to add more things so the update video will contain more interesting stuff.