Wright State University Lake Campus/2018-1/Ping pong air drag

From Wikipedia permalinks

w:Reynolds number @ w:special:permalink/822809548

A w:vortex street around a cylinder. This can occur around cylinders and spheres, for any fluid, cylinder size and fluid speed, provided that the flow has a Reynolds number between roughly 40 and 1000.

The Reynolds number is defined as

\mathrm {Re} ={\frac {\rho uL}{\mu }}={\frac {uL}{\nu }}

where:

$\rho$ is the w:density of the fluid (SI units: kg/m³)
$u$ is the velocity of the fluid with respect to the object (m/s)
$L$ is a characteristic linear dimension (m). For a sphere L=2R is the diameter.
$\mu$ is the dynamic viscosity (Pa·s or N·s/m² or kg/m·s)
$\nu$ is the kinematic viscosity (m²/s).

w:Viscosity @ w:special:permalink/824605819#Air

The viscosity of air depends mostly on the temperature. At 15 °C, the viscosity of air is 1.81x10⁻⁵ kg/(m·s) 18.1 μPa·s or 1.81x10⁻⁵ Pa·s. The kinematic viscosity at 15 °C is 1.4810x10⁻⁵m²/s or 14.8 cSt. At 25 °C, the viscosity is 18.6 μPa·s and the kinematic viscosity 15.7 cSt.

Here, 1 cSt = 1 mm²·s⁻¹ = 10⁻⁶ m²·s−1.

w:Drag (physics) @ w:special:permalink/823381084

F_{D}\,=\,{\tfrac {1}{2}}\,\rho \,v^{2}\,C_{D}\,A

Original effort circa 2/1/18

From this graph we estimate an acceleration of 7 cm/s/s at a speed of 50 cm/s.

2/8/18 Thursday phy2400 lab

We will attempt to simulate this with Matlab:

I think we did the Reynold's number thing wrong. I get Re=300 here, and that means C =1 here

At sea level and at 15 °C air has a density of approximately 1.225 kg/m³

Ping pong ball: radius = 20mm; mass=2.7g