[HN Gopher] Centrifugal flows drive reverse rotation of Feynman'...
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       Centrifugal flows drive reverse rotation of Feynman's sprinkler
        
       Author : sohkamyung
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2024-01-25 12:30 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (journals.aps.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (journals.aps.org)
        
       | aredox wrote:
       | "The issue of reversibility in hydromechanical sprinklers that
       | auto-rotate while ejecting fluid from S-shaped tubes raises
       | fundamental questions that remain unresolved" - I thought that
       | was resolved already, by the fact in one case the fluid is
       | expelled outside of the sprinkler and doesn't interact with it,
       | whereas in suction the fluid "bumps" into to curve of the
       | sprinkler and cancels most of the pull of the suction.
        
         | leephillips wrote:
         | There's a lot in classical physics that remains puzzling and
         | even controversial:
         | 
         | http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/the-never-ending-conu...
        
       | eig wrote:
       | The most intuitive explanation for the Feynman sprinkler I can
       | think of is conservation of angular momentum.
       | 
       | In the pump-out case, the water adds positive angular momentum
       | when it flies out, so the sprinkler body must add negative
       | angular momentum (constant torque) to have conservation.
       | 
       | In the Feynman suck-in case, the water drains from the base of
       | the sprinkler without any angular momentum, so the sprinkler head
       | does not have to add an opposite angular momentum (feel a
       | constant torque).
        
         | MatthiasWandel wrote:
         | regardless of what happens inside the S-curve, the opening ends
         | up getting a slight vacuum from suction, but there is no such
         | suction on the opposite side.
         | 
         | Imagine the S is straight, but a vane attached to the side of
         | the pipe blocks suction from one side.
         | 
         | I tried to illustrate this in ascii art, but it appears HN has
         | an algorithm to destroy ascii art.
         | 
         | That vane will now have a slight vacuum on the side of the
         | pipe, and it seems logical that it should want to move in that
         | direction.
         | 
         | Now imagine that vane curved around the pipe so it forms the
         | end of the S-bend. Same thing.
        
           | toxik wrote:
           | Hi Matthias, love your channel. You can indent text by four
           | spaces to show preformatted text:                   hello
           | world
        
             | MatthiasWandel wrote:
             | Ok, ascii diagram for my previous comment, indented:
             | ===============         Pipe  <---Suck
             | ===============
             | -----------vane-----------
        
         | verteu wrote:
         | In the reverse case, why doesn't the water add negative angular
         | momentum when it "flies in"?
         | 
         | IMO, that's the crucial asymmetry -- fans "blow out" air in a
         | straight line, but "suck in" air from the entire surroundings.
        
           | eig wrote:
           | You got it- the sucking in comes from all directions.
           | 
           | In response to your first question, the water doesn't add
           | negative angular momentum because the whole system we are
           | conserving is the sprinkler body and the moving water
           | together. The sum must just be zero in both cases. We can
           | track a single drop of water in case two (Feynman) to see how
           | the conservation works. At the start the drop is at zero
           | angular momentum since it is stationary in the tank. It then
           | passes through the whole Sprinkler mechanism (and whatever
           | s-curves there are) and ends up at the suction drain at the
           | center of the sprinkler also at zero angular momentum.
           | Therefore no matter what happened it could not have applied a
           | net torque to the sprinkler, no matter the path it took to
           | get to the drain.
           | 
           | Contrast with case 1, the regular sprinkler, where the water
           | drop starts at zero angular momentum (pumped from the center
           | of the sprinkler) and ends with positive angular momentum
           | (spinning away from the center) therefore it must have
           | applied an opposing net torque at some point in its journey
           | to the body of the sprinkler, which spins.
        
             | thehappypm wrote:
             | I think it's a different thing actually.
             | 
             | When you're forcing the water in, you've got a pipe with
             | pressure greater than the water. Pressure is a measurement
             | of force per unit area. The pressure of the water presses
             | evenly on the tube walls, but there is no tube walls at the
             | opening. So, there is a spot where there is no pressure on
             | the tube. This means a net force because that lack of
             | pushing on the opening is not canceled out. Since the
             | pressure differential is in the direction of the rotational
             | axis you get rotation.
             | 
             | In the reverse, there is also more pressure in the tubes
             | than in the water. However, the spot where there is a net
             | difference in pressure is the drain. The drain has an
             | opening putting less pressure, so we get a net force.
             | However the direction of the net force is perpendicular to
             | the rotational axis--so we get no rotation.
        
       | mhuffman wrote:
       | Matthias Wandel did some experiments on this recently and came to
       | some conclusions of his own it seems.
       | 
       | [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ued2cEcfAio
       | 
       | [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3scTRJCm7w
        
         | mhb wrote:
         | Some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985308
        
       | GuB-42 wrote:
       | Note that the problem the paper is about is that in real life,
       | using precision instruments, the Feynman's sprinkler _does_
       | rotate the other way under suction.
       | 
       | The counterintuitive asymmetry between blowing and sucking is
       | already well understood.
        
         | eig wrote:
         | You can interact with a working demonstration booth of this at
         | MIT. That apparatus had an initial backwards torque when you
         | turned on the suction, but no constant torque pushing it the
         | other way once everything hit steady state. I wonder why these
         | authors seem to have gotten a different result...
        
       | Sharlin wrote:
       | Nominative determinism: the name of the second author is Brennan
       | _Sprinkle_.
        
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