The leaky tank mystery 2024
Contents
- 1 Supervisors
- 2 Honours students
- 3 Project guidelines
- 4 General project description
- 5 Specific tasks
- 6 Deliverables
- 7 Weekly progress and questions
- 8 Approach and methodology
- 9 Possible extension
- 10 Expectations
- 11 Relationship to possible career path
- 12 See also
- 13 References and useful resources
- 14 Back
Supervisors
Honours students
Project guidelines
General project description
Imagine one of those railcars that has a big horizontal water tank. Pretend it is frictionless. Imagine the tank is full. Imaging there's a hole at the top to let air in. Imagine the tank is leaking through a small hole on the left bottom side of the tank. Assume the jet of water is vertically downward. Does the resulting change in momentum push the railcar to the left or the right?
This is a very famous problem that has never been properly solved. We need finally put it to rest. We will give you papers showing attempted solutions that contradict each other. You may try to search for more papers on the topic.
The experiment is almost impossible to do in practice as the forces are smaller than the friction you get in real life. This explains why there are contradictory solutions. This illustrates an important principle in engineering that your can never be sure of the theory until you do the experiment.
But the modern world of engineering now has simulation tools that we trust and are as good as an experiment provided we don't feed it with wild parameters outside of the range that models are valid.
We want you to do the "experiment" in simulation using Comsol and/or Ansys. The Faculty has licences. Find the answer. Then go and find which theory paper got it correct. Then nicely explain that theory yourself, written out clearly in your own way.
This is a beautiful classic problem and it will be a lot of fun. If you can think of a clever way to actually do a low friction experiment and video it, this will be a cherry on that cake and your name will go down in history. Suggest you design a rectangular tank and suspend it hanging with four cords attached to the corners. You'll need to design a release valve for the water that is actuated by a remote (because you can't touch the tank). Suggest you bounce a laser pointer off the tank as a way of measuring deflection. However, you need to fully simulate the tank first to get all the size parameters right to optimize the size of the deflection.
Specific tasks
List out the specific tasks you need to do to complete this project:
- etc
- etc
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Deliverables
Semester 1
- Start Project Work (Week 1)
- Proposal seminar (Week 5)
- Progress report (Week 12) - only one report needed in wiki format
Semester 2
- Final seminar (Week 10)
- Final report (Week 11) - only one report needed in wiki format
- Poster (Week 12) - one poster only needed
- Project exhibition 'expo' (Week 12)
- CD or stick containing your whole project directories (Week 13)
- YouTube video (Week 13) - add the URL to this wiki
Weekly progress and questions
This is where you record your progress and ask questions. Make sure you update this every week.
Approach and methodology
We expect you to take a structured approach to simulation, theory and experiment.
Possible extension
If you knock off this project too easily, you can extend the work to analysis Feynman's sprinkler.
Expectations
- To get good marks we expect you to show a logical approach to decisively eliminating hypotheses.
- In your conclusion, you need to come up with a short list of likely possibilities and a list of things you can definitely eliminate.
- We expect all the written work to be place on this wiki. No paper reports are to be handed up.
- It is expected that you fill out a short progress report on the wiki each week, every Friday evening, to briefly state what you did that week and what the goals are for the following week.
- It is important to regularly see your main supervisors. Don't let more than 2 week go by without them seeing your face briefly.
- You should be making at least one formal progress meeting with supervisors per month. It does not strictly have to be exactly a month, but roughly each month you should be in a position to show some progress and have some problems and difficulties to discuss.
- The onus is on you to drive the meetings, make the appointments and set them up.
- You are expected to make a YouTube presentation of your whole project.
Relationship to possible career path
The skills you pick up up in sultaing this problem will be relevant to hydrology and all forms of mechanical and civil engineering that consider fluid flow.
See also
References and useful resources
If you find any useful external links, list them here:
