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.
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