Whatever Happened to Fluid Logic?

The Sinclair 100 pocket calculator (change the PP3 battery every couple of hours)? Cor! What sums it could do!

That must have be the intended mechanical transistor replacement for a worn out mechanism for a pipe organ.

Ever heard of Sweets Reunited?

http://www.britishcandy.com/nostalgic_sweets_retro_candy1990.htm

(Tales of a mis-spent youth....)

Munch...this ..chew.. thread...yum...was ... mmmm sweet tobacco....s'posed to be about.... fizz drool... Engineering!

Report for detention after school!

We have 2 shops in our town that sell most of those sweets over the counter, one of them even makes sweets on site & you can watch the process from the shop.

I once saw an "upsetter" press that used fluid logic to control its cycle. It worked perfectly, but the sequence couldn't be altered. I spent a few days understanding how it worked and then replaced it with a small PLC and a few hyd valves. In general it's slow, expensive to make and run and hard to change.

Anyway, it's best to leave the logic/control stuff to us electrical blokes, it makes us feel needed. Jeff

I too remeber being impressed with fluidics when I too was a student in the early 70's. I still think it could be relevant in certain situations. A lot of good ideas get shoved out by rapid advances in electronics ---- too hastely: in my opinion. In fact it would be very nice if somebody could compile a list of such "also ran" ideas so that it could be resurected and developed at some appropriate juncture. For example some ideas may have failled to take off because proper materials or production facilities were not available at the time.

I had a Ford Escort (1982-85?) with fluidic nozzles for the windshield washer. When they squirted, the fluid hit a much larger area than with standard nozzles. They worked quite well. Now, laser projected images are created in somewhat (vaguely) the same way -- in fact, it's also a little bit like the scanning going on in a CRT.

It's still alive-

Microfluidic Bubble Logic

Manu Prakash and Neil Gershenfeld
Science 9 February 2007 315: 832-835 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1136907] (in Reports)
......individual droplets. We demonstrate bubble logic that implements universal Boolean logic in physical fluid dynamics. This provides a droplet-level...bistable gate ( 16 , 17 ). Boolean logic in a single-phase Newtonian fluid was implemented by changes in flow......
they just added gas to the logic (political science) Brad

Some good stuff ...cheers guys. I'm relieved it wasn't a pigment of my imagination.

(deliberate malapropism...don't shoot)

My experience with fluid logic was in production machines that the company I worked for sold. The downfall of theses machines was that they required really clean air. Clean air is not something that production plants have. All of our fluid logic was eventually replaced by electronics because our customers simply wouldn't or couldn't supply clean air or maintain the machine filters.

I too remember the fluidic windshield washer nozzles. My 90 Taurus had them. Worked great.

Hi:

This fluidic topic is something I haven't seen in long time. I worked with another student in college (1968), on a fluidic carburetor using a fluidic vortex amplifier. There was another school working on one too. Damned if it didn't work! We test ran it on a jeep engine in mech eng lab. A few years later, I remember reading about a guy who built one on a running vehicle and tried to get the automotive industry excited about it. But, you can guess what happened.

About 1970, I remember reading an article about the U.S. Army testing a Stability Augmentation System for a helicopter. It took advantage of one of the most overlooked feature of fluidics...EMP hardening. It was immune to the EMP pulse of a nuclear detonation. Remember, this was Cold War years. It worked fine, but the elctronics boys finally found ways to harden electronic gear.

I do remember how the fluidic flip-flop worked. It had a main jet which could be directed to one of two outlet ports. To change state, a small pulse was put into the side control ports and the main jet would detach from one wall and attach to the other. It was held there by the Coanda effect. I haven't Googled that yet...maybe someone else would check it out.

Fluidics was a technology invented when it's time had passed. As long as the supply air was kept clean, it would work in harsh, dirty, electrically noisy, and hazardous environments. But it's speed was slow and the electronics industry finally ramped up and surpassed it. It was an interesting time.

Hank

Yeh...it was the flip flop that impressed me at the time...

I can remember building a couple of fluid logic circuits in the seventies just to see if they worked. I seem to recall that the other selling point was that you didn't lose the programming if you had a power cut. The modules used were quite large, I imagine that they could be miniaturised now but can't think why it would be worth the effort of doing it.

Let's have your 'what happened to's '...

Those clunky mechanical adding machines. About the size and weight of a couple of house bricks. We'd lug 'em out of the maths cupboard and see who could crank the handle fastest.

Ohhh..I thought they were knitting machines?

( reminds me of the joke.... two gay chaps talking...

'My Mum made me a homosexual..'

'Ooh, If I pay for the wool will she make me one?' )

(Please note...this is not homophobic..don't anyone shoot)

OK. Here's one... What happened to the purely optical computer that used phase-conjugate mirrors and gallium photo sensors that could distinguish images better than any computer could. For instance, you could show it pictures of trees, and it would always identify a different picture of the same species. It also had the ability to reject things like telephone poles as not being trees at all.

So where the heck did that go?!

Yes, but my adding machine was real ! I cranked it's little handle with glee. Now I'm going to have to hunt for a picture. All the computer folk here, and nobody has a picture of one.

Don't recogmnize the exact type, but it was one of these 1960s style ones.

Yes that's nice dear.

Hey...Do you remember the cartoon ad' thingy for cleaning your teeth....?

Boy skipping along top of a low wall ...

'Look Mum crocodile...!

Yes dear I hope he cleans his teeth every night and every morning'

How abstruse!

Are you sure your not talking about your years raiding with The Crimson Permanent Assurance?

Del, I use to do this back in the 70's and 80's.

I worked for a Hydraulic Company and designed with Fluid Logic Circuits. Mostly for NEMA 4 type enviroments. The companies that manufactured the "Fluidic" components stopped making them. I went with a Pneumatics's Company and designed circuits using Clippard and Festo components on laminated acrylic boards that I designed and had fabricated. They were successful and we had several OEM's of high tech fabrication and assembly equipment using them.

After I retired in the 90's I just lost track of what was being done.

I went on line and found Clippard.

http://www.clippard.com/downloads/general/PDF_Documents/2006%20Catalog/Catalog%20by%20Section/Modular%20Valves.pdf

Is a page from their 2006 catalog and shows some circuit boards that are similar to the ones I designed.

I think that Fluidics as controls is dead. But I would think that Air Logic is still alive and doing well.

Hey that's really cool...must still have some niche markets, maybe explosive atmopheres?

Nice link

Cheers

Del

Hey Del!

Look what I found:

http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0734343

This the Helicopter Stability Augmentation System report I mentioned! I can't believe Google found it.

Hank

Tasty...

The Article in Science I found fascinating was how they milled the channels in glass blocks for the fluid logic by multiple lasers focusing through the block from several points with the vaporised exhaust going out the excavated channels.

3D micro tunneling. Talk about glass micro machines.

Machine your tool etc. from the inside out, the whole multistage process, pluming, input, and output smaller than a sugar cube. It wouldn't take much chemicals at the Brownian level.

Alas I have no application for such.

Went the same way as the fluid amplifier. A fluid amp uses a very small flow of fluid to move a large flow. It works well at low frequency's but as the hertz goes up the efficiency goes down.

Both work in very hostile environments - but - I don't recall ever seeing one in operation.

The fluid amp gave me an understanding of exactly how any other amp works.

Of coarse this was before the 70's

It sprung a leak.

Maybe it has to get slipperier to work. What a bout "fluid lubrelogic?"

Heck! Put some Slick-50 into that baby!!!

There is a horribly mesmeric effect in your exchanges...the juxtaposition of glamour and slimey gloopy stuff is leading us inexorably down a certain pathe...just hope your Mum's don't catch you two !

Keep repeating the word "glamour" until you get the full affect. Almost all words in English that end in "our" and start with "glam" are gookie substances best wiped on axles or something like that.