Rotating Convection
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Looking inside the water tank
- In this experiment, in order to see inside the
convection layer, we used 1mm glass sheets for the
top and bottom boundary. Glass has better thermal
conductivity than water, but not as good as metals,
so inevitably a gap in temperature occurred above and
below the glass sheets. In this experiment, we
estimated the temperature gap on the inner side of
the glass in contact with the working fluid to be
half the temperature gap between the hot and cold
water.
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Wipers
- In a water tank constructed like a set of nested
boxes, if bubbles attach to the surface of the glass
they can be difficult to get rid of. With the method
we selected for making the fluid movement visible, we
had to look at the weak light of scattered liquid
crystal capsules, but any bubbles, even ones not in
line with the light plane, light up quite brightly.
In order to remove the bubbles, we sunk a sponge
attached to the length of an aluminium rod in each
layer and used it whenever bubbles occurred.