Monday, August 12, 2013

Supercritical CO2 extraction of cinnamon, coffee, and vanilla with dry ice

I built a small extraction chamber for processing materials with supercritical CO2.

Please refer to my previous videos for more information about supercritical co2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gCTKteN5Y4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvmM6qa2a90

PDF discussing vanilla extraction with SC CO2:
http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/482/48221175004.pdf


Monday, August 5, 2013

Making patterned mirrors and ITO glass with a thermal evaporator

I've put enough work into my thermal evaporator project so that I can actually start using it to create thin films. For my first test, I make some aluminum mirrors on glass, and also coated glass with ITO (Indium Tin Oxide). The mirrors look nice, but the ITO was not conductive -- more research required.


Photomicrography (microphotography, macro), focus stacking

In this video, I show my setup for taking focus-stacked images with microscope objectives. I use a Lumix GH1, which is a micro 4/3 format camera, and a custom adapter that lets me interface the camera to a microscope body or directly to a microscope objective.

Video-rate focus stacking with a liquid lens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOyXdnJOHCY

CombineZM software for focus stacking:
http://hadleyweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/CZM/News.htm

Using Photoshop for focus stacking:
http://photo.tutsplus.com/articles/post-processing-articles/focus-stacking-made-easy-with-photoshop/