Julie Nassoy, Margot Nguyen Huu, Léon Rembotte, Jean-Baptiste Trebbia and Pierre Nassoy
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
The water bottle flip experiment is a recreational, non-conventional illustration of the conservation of angular momentum. When a bottle partially filled with water is thrown in a rotational motion, water redistributes throughout the bottle, resulting in an increase of moment of inertia and thus a decrease in angular velocity, which increases the probability of it falling upright on a table as compared with a bottle filled with ice. The investigation of this phenomenom is accessible to undergraduate students and should allow them to gain better understanding of combined translational and rotational motions in classical mechanics. We report a series of detailed experiments that are quantitatively compared with numerical calculations based on a simple theoretical framework in which the water volume is decomposed into thin slices of a rigid body that are subjected to fictitious forces in the non-inertial frame of the spinning bottle. This model also allows us to capture and predict other experimental configurations. Finally, we discuss additional counter-intuitive effects that contribute to bottle stabilization on landing.
期刊介绍:
European Journal of Physics is a journal of the European Physical Society and its primary mission is to assist in maintaining and improving the standard of taught physics in universities and other institutes of higher education.
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