Another neat experiment in the collection I’ve recently been talking about is measuring pressure at different points on a wing profile. It’s not terribly surprising that – as long as the wing is oriented in the correct way in the flow – pressure is high below the wing and low above it. Kinda the whole […]
Another one of those awesome hydrodynamics toys: A Pitot tube! This is what it looks like: What you can’t see here is the little hole at the tip of the tube that is pointing downwards in the picture. What the Pitot tube measures is the pressure difference between that hole (the stagnation pressure since it’s […]
On Monday I posted about playing with Venturi tubes. Guess what: We are going to play more today! Because today the Venturi tubes are connected to a “proper” manometer: Now, if I wasn’t so lazy this would be a great opportunity to get good readings of the pressure differences caused by different flow rates. However, […]
A Venturi tube is one of the things one hears about in hydrodynamics class all the time, but one never gets to see them for real. And even though I just said on Friday that the thing that I found most fascinating in the aerodynamics collection I got to borrow recently was to see how […]
One of the things that fascinated me most when playing with the huge fan we used to look at the flow downstream of a paddle was how the flow direction reverses. Unfortunately (alas, it was to be expected) we didn’t really see this on the paper towel stream line test I did the other day. But […]
We’ve played with the flow around a paddle recently, and you didn’t really believe I stopped there, did you? Of course I didn’t! But I have many many hours of video footage, and I haven’t had the chance to sift through all of them yet. So here’s a preview of what is about to come […]
Whenever I’m in a canoe or kayak, I love watching the two eddies that form behind the paddle when you pull it through the water. It looks kinda like this: Instead of pulling a paddle through more or less stagnant water, we could also use a stationary paddle in a flow. And that is the setup […]
This is another one of the experiments from the aerodynamics experiments kit that I borrowed at work (see here). We’ve all seen water bottle & bike pump rockets before, but this one worked incredibly well! You’ll see us jump whenever it launches. Don’t you want to start playing when you see this?
Recently, someone at my university told me about a case of experiments connected to aerodynamics* that they occasionally use for demonstrations and outreach. Obviously, I asked if I might possibly borrow the case, and fast forward: my dad and I spent a whole weekend playing. I’m gonna go through all the experiments over the next […]
