From making aerated chocolate bars to processing human waste, many industrial
processes rely on a flow of perfectly sized bubbles. But the size of bubbles
changes with variations in temperature and pressure.
Now the CSIRO, Australia’s national research organisation, has produced a
computer program that monitors the size of bubbles. Big bubbles make a
low-frequency rumble as they pass and smaller ones are higher-pitched. So the
program, called Streamtone, tunes into the bubble stream and sounds a warning if
the pitch changes. The program is already monitoring the oxygen flow to bacteria
in a plant making genetically engineered hormones.
