Possible hole fix - Drip those holes away!

[NoctumSolis]

A mobile phone vibrator might allow the resin to overcome surface tension. Turned ON when the laser is OFF. The ripples wud die down quite rapidly in a viscous fluid.

I was also thinking something similar, though less a vibrating motor and more a subwoofer speaker (because I have a few just sitting around in the basement) against the side or bottom of the tank to put a low-frequency noise into the fluid between layers. With a speaker playing a tone, you can get nice fine adjustment of the output to find just the right tone for your tank. (oh yeah, that's right, more things to calibrate! )

I'm not too well up on fluid dynamics, but I would imagine that to get decent coverage this way a fairly substantial disturbance would be required. Since the waves will lose energy with increasing distance from the source the amplitude would also be different depending on depth. Right?

[jstrack2]

I'd seen some of this but missed some details, sorry. I hadn't noticed that you had a working solution to the ripple problem. Obviously though, costly things such as solenoids are exactly what I was hoping to avoid. But if it works, it works.

It was my fault, I was not very clear in that thread. When I post an updated video sometime I will show things a lot better. A five dollar solenoid will work. I am currently working on making a solenoid for something else that would require well less than a dollar in materials, but a little labor. It should also be strong enough.

I'm not too well up on fluid dynamics, but I would imagine that to get decent coverage this way a fairly substantial disturbance would be required. Since the waves will lose energy with increasing distance from the source the amplitude would also be different depending on depth. Right?

I think that there can be not that much loss depending on how things are set up. Since it is a wave it can just propagate through the liquid to the surface. However if the wave goes directly towards the surface (in other words normal to the surface) it will just pass on through to the air without creating a surface wave. So in that sense having a deeper tank will force the angle to be on average smaller which will cause more of the waves' energy to pass through into the air rather than creating surface waves. Regardless though I don't think it will be hard at all to create the surface waves. They can be tricky to get rid of, but are darn easy to make!