II. APPARATUS
We operated the pendulum in two ways: with a fixed suspension
and with a motor-driven suspension. The fixed suspension
was used to observe the decay of the pendulum’s
amplitude. The driven suspension permits observation of the
pendulum motion at constant amplitude near the resonant
frequency of the pendulum.
A glass aquarium tank is filled with the fluid in which the
pendulum bob oscillates. For the cases described here, the
working fluid is de-ionized water, with a small amount of
thymol blue dissolved therein. The pendulum is constructed
using various spherical metal balls suspended on either lightweight
magnet wire or fishing line. A brushless linear motor,
driven sinusoidally, was used for the driven suspension.
A digital video camera was used to measure the amplitude
of oscillation at any point in time. The ring radii were measured
with a digital camera. The camera setups were calibrated
by imaging a steel rule located on the focal plane.
In the decaying oscillation experiments, two pendulum
lengths were used 315 and 155 cm. Assuming a maximum
amplitude of 10 cm, then the angle cosines would be cos
=0.9995 and 0.9979, thus preserving the small-angle approximation.
For most of the observations, the camera location
was such to limit the parallax error to less than 0.15%.
The Baker electrolytic technique is used to visualize the
vortex rings from the spherical bobs. The electrochemistry
and other physical details are described in Mazo et al. 20.
The pendulum and resultant rings are photographed in silhouette.
The oscillation amplitude is extracted from the recorded
images with the use of an in-house-written software. Vortex
ring sizes were measured using standard software packages
such as PHOTOSHOP.
III. DRAG COEFFICIENT IN WATER
For small amplitude motion of the driven pendulum, no
vortex rings are shed as illustrated in Fig. 1a. As the amplitude
of oscillation increases, the pendulum bob begins to
shed vortex rings as it reverses direction at the top of each
swing. This is shown in Fig. 1b, where for a continuously
driven pendulum, vortex rings stack up as they migrate toward
the tank boundaries. Figure 2 shows a time sequence of
images depicting the shedding of the boundary layer from
the pendulum bob during a directional reversal.
A commonly measured parameter used to quantify the
drag force experienced by an object is the dimensionless
drag coefficient CD, defined as
CD =
F
1
2
V2A
, 5
where V=A is taken as the characteristic velocity for a
given swing, A is the projected area of the sphere, Rs
2, and
F is the average force over one period. Our photographs
allowed us to determine the height y of the sphere above the
lowest point at the center of the arc as well as the amplitude
A. The change in potential energy
U can be easily related to
the work done if the change in height
y is small,
U
=Mg
y, where M is the physical mass corrected for buoyancy
and g is acceleration due to gravity. The distance traveled
during one period is approximately 4A, so the average
work done is 4AF and by conservation of energy
F =
U
4A
. 6
The resulting drag coefficient is shown in Fig. 3. Pixel resolution
limits this technique below Re=300.
IV. DRAG COEFFICIENT IN LIQUID HELIUM
Schoepe’s group at Regensburg produced several pioneering
papers on the motion of a small sphere of magnetic material
100 m in radius, suspended between the superconducting
plates of a capacitor, and carrying an electric charge
e.g., 21. The velocity amplitude and resonance frequency
are measured as a function of driving force and temperature
in liquid helium at temperatures between 0.35 and 2.2 K.
Liquid helium is a Navier-Stokes fluid above 2.176 K and we
show their results at 2.2 K in Fig. 3. We also show results at
2.1 K, which can be considered a mixture of normal and
superfluid, with the normal-fluid density about 75% of the
total density and behaves not far from being a classical fluid.
The results are plotted in Fig. 3 and fit with our data remarkably
well, especially at higher Reynolds numbers. The effective
kinematic viscosity of liquid helium at 2.1 K is about
1.6710−4 cm2 / s Stalp et al. 22 with a Stokes number
St=642. For our pendulum in water, St=653.
(b)
(a)
FIG. 1. Photographs of a laminar flow at small amplitude oscillation
and b a street of vortex rings at larger amplitude
oscillation.