Last Thursday, Torge & I invited his “atmosphere & ocean dynamics class” to a virtual excursion into my kitchen — to do some cool experiments. As you know, I have the DIYnamics rotating table setup at home, so this is what it looked like: We did two experiments, the very boring (but very important) solid […]
Several of my friends were planning on teaching with DIYnamics rotating tables right now. Unfortunately, that’s currently impossible. Fortunately, though, I have one at home and enjoy playing with it enough that I’m Playing with it Making videos of me playing with it Putting the videos on the internet Going to do video calls with my […]
For both of my tank experiment projects, in Bergen and in Kiel, we want to develop a Taylor column demonstration. So here are my notes on the setup we are considering, but before actually having tried it. Since water under rotation becomes rigid, funny things can happen. For example if a current in a rotating […]
One of the first exercises Torge and I plan on doing with the students in our “dry theory to juicy reality” project is to bring a water-filled tank to solid body rotation and measure rotation, surface height at the center of the tank and the sides, as well as water depth before rotation, and then have […]
With all the rotating tank experiments I’ve been showing lately, one thing that comes up over and over again is the issue of solid body rotation. On our DIYnamics-inspired turntable for our “dry theory to juicy reality” project, Torge and I came up with a fun way to illustrate the importance of full body rotation in […]
Ekman spirals — current profiles that rotate their direction over depth, caused by friction and Coriolis force — are really neat to observe in a rotating tank. I just found out that they are apparently (according to Wikipedia) called “corkscrew currents” in German, and that’s what they look like, too. I tend to think of […]
Inspired by the article “Affordable Rotating Fluid Demonstrations for Geoscience Education: the DIYnamics Project” by the Hill et al. (2018), Joke, Torge and I have been wanting to build an affordable rotating table for teaching for a while now. On Saturday, we met up again to work on the project. This post is mainly to document […]
Confusing students even more by discussing how momentum is being transferred from the tank to the water. As you remember, we are preparing for the Ekman experiment and need to spin up the tank to solid body rotation. We had started discussing how, when observed from the co-rotating camera, particles seem to be slowing down […]
Spinning up a tank until all water particles move with the same angular velocity. Before running the Ekman spiral experiment, the tank needs to be spun up to solid body rotation. Even though the concept itself is not difficult, it seems to be difficult to determine when a body of water has reached the point […]
