A family member recently got a heart pacemaker put in.
I was reading the “owner’s manual” when I was at the hospital this week, right before she got the thing installed.
These pacemakers are pretty amazing pieces of gear.
The battery lasts for 5 years plus.
In the meantime, the pacemaker stands watch, like a Marine, guarding the heart rhythm.
Two leads were inserted in a vein under the collarbone, and then the leads go directly into the heart to monitor the rhythm and provide a shock if necessary.
The pacemaker has a computer, so it “learns” what your heart rate is like. If you exercise, it figures that out and adjusts its internal rhythm.
If your heart slows, or stops, it gives the shock, or multiple shocks, to get it going regularly again.
All this from a small device that gets put in under the skin on your chest.
Nice, neat, and life improving.
Contrast that new shiny pacemaker with the old school sphericity and roundness test for testing frac sand!
The sphericity and roundness test is really old school.
Yes, you use a newer style microscope and tools to analyze the picture of the scope on your computer.
But, then you compare results that you see with the Krumbein and Sloss chart from 1963!
The chart hangs prominently in our lab.
Why is this? Why use such an old test to check sphericity and roundness?
Well, the answer is that the test works.
Most sand obviously fails the roundness half of the sphericity and roundness test for frac sand.
There doesn’t tend to be “splitting hairs” with this test. It’s quite obvious when the sphericity and roundness is above 0.6 on each.
And quite obvious when that sand really isn’t frac sand.
The chart is old, but it works.
So we will keep honoring its tradition, and using it religiously in our lab, so long as it’s the API standard way to test!
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