A Study of SplashesWorthington, A. M. (Arthur Mason)
Science
A Study of Splashes
Worthington, A. M. (Arthur Mason)
Splashes
No one looking at these photographs can fail to be struck with the close
resemblance to some of the splashes that we have studied. There is the
same _slight_ upheaval of the neighbouring surface, the same crater,
with the same curled lip, leading to the inference that under the
immense and suddenly applied pressure, the steel has behaved like a
liquid.
Such flow of metals under great pressure is familiar enough to
mechanical engineers, but what I desire to suggest is, that from a study
of the motions set up in a liquid in an analogous case, it may be
possible to deduce information about the distribution of internal
stress, which may apply also to a solid, and may thus lead to
improvements in the construction of a plate that is intended to resist
penetration.
CHAPTER XI
(SUPPLEMENTARY)
A NEW PHENOMENON THAT APPEARS WITH AN INCREASE IN THE VELOCITY
OF ENTRY OF A ROUGH SPHERE
A slight delay in the passage of this book through the press has enabled
me to obtain some of the missing information referred to in the opening
paragraph of the last chapter.
If any reader who may have been persuaded to try for himself the simple
experiment mentioned at the beginning of Chapter VII, will extend his
observations by increasing the height of fall of the roughened marble to
4 or 5 feet (say to 140 centim.), he will find that while, as before,
much air is still carried down, there is nevertheless, now, no
rebounding jet projected high into the air, such as is invariably seen
with the lower fall of 2 feet (60 centim.), and he will notice a curious
"seething" appearance at the surface.[K] Thinking that this appearance
which the naked eye detects must be due to an entanglement of the rising
jet with the bubble, which entanglement was likely to produce confused
motions that could not be profitably studied, I had not till now been
sufficiently curious to examine what really happened. But certain recent
observations of the persistence with which the seething motion again and
again recurred when a stone was dropped or thrown into a river, led me
to suspect that something required investigation. I was, however, quite
unprepared to find the remarkable change of procedure that is revealed
by the following series of photographs (Series XVII), in the taking of
which I owe much to the kind and skilful assistance of Dr. Bryan. The
earlier figures show the very rapid rise of the crater and its closing
as a bubble much before the entrapped column of air divides. Before the
division takes place, the liquid now flowing in from all sides closes
over the upper end of the long air-tube, separates it from the air
outside, and _forms a downward jet which shoots down the middle of the
air-tube in pursuit of the sphere_. The first formation of this jet is
not easy to observe, because the view is obscured by much splashing and
turbulent vortical motion resulting apparently from the collision of the
streams that converge from all sides on the axis of the air-tube at its
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