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Darryl Fujita, Civil Engineer, Electrical-Mechanical Test & Development Craftsman: We’re showing
the kids how electricity works at “Bring Your Kid to Work Day.” Here we are creating
a simple motor. We’re forming a coil using a highlighter. We are stripping the insulation
off of one end [of the coil]. The other end we’re stripping insulation just off of half
of it. And then we’re putting it [coil] in our little holder here, which is made of
the rubber erasers and the two paper clips. And we’re using the permanent magnet as
out permanent magnet source. And then we’re using our battery to provide current to make
an electromagnet that’s turning on and off. That action of attraction and repulsion will
cause the motor to rotate.
Kid 1: I got it.
Kid 2: I can reverse the direction. Now it’s going counter-clockwise. You see it changing
direction? I like it.
Kid 1: Look at the sparks … right there.
Parent 1: Oh my gosh, I just saw it.
Chris Robinson, Geologist: The great thing about rocks is the closer you look at them,
the places you find them and the more you know about them, the more it tells a story.
One of the things that geologists do at BPA is we look at rock materials for construction
purposes.
Now the advantage of having silica in a rock is that the silica makes for a good insulator.
So when we’re walking on a substation we don’t want to be a part of the path of the
electrical current to ground. That’s a bad place to be.
Mick Johnson, Mechanical Engineer: And the power is carried over conductors like this
one. And you see that there’s no insulation on this. There’s some plastic tape down
here but that’s all. An extension cord at home has a plastic cover on it or a rubber
jacket on it so that you can’t touch the wires and get shocked. But this doesn’t
have that. It’s just bare wire so if you touched it you’d get shocked. So the way
we protect everyone is we put this [conductor] so high up in the air that you can’t touch
it.
We’re going to break this piece of rope. And the crews that use the rope want to know
that it’s good and strong. So this machine is good for a half-a-million pounds.
Kid 3: Interesting.
Brian Tuttle, Chemist: Here are kind of the main key components of the reaction [Diet
Coke and Mentos experiment]. You’ve got your caffeine; aspartame, which is a sugar/artificial
sweetener; potassium benzoate, which is a food preservative. The Mentos itself has all
of these little pits in the surface of it and that’s really the key to the reaction.
If we don’t monitor the gases inside of the equipment, things like this can happen.
This is a picture of a transformer that blew up, caught fire … all sorts of bad, nasty
things happened.
Jeff Hildreth, Supervisory Electrical Engineer: Welcome to the high-voltage test hall. This
is where we do the indoor high-voltage testing. There are two general categories of tests
that we do here in the High Voltage Lab. We do what we call power frequency tests. And
power frequency is the type of power that gets transmitted on power lines and gets consumed
in homes, so that’s what we’re testing with over here. And on this side of the lab
we’re testing with lightning. So we can produce up to two million volts of lightning
here in the building. And up to 1.1 million volts of power frequency here.