English

Relationship between the size of camphor-driven rotor and its angular velocity

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems 2017-08-02 v2

Abstract

We consider a rotor made of two camphor disks glued below the ends of a plastic stripe. The disks are floating on a water surface and the plastic stripe does not touch the surface. The system can rotate around a vertical axis located at the center of the stripe. The disks dissipate camphor molecules. The driving momentum comes from the nonuniformity of surface tension resulting from inhomogeneous surface concentration of camphor molecules around the disks. We investigate the stationary angular velocity as a function of rotor radius \ell. For large \ell the angular velocity decreases for increasing \ell. At a specific value of \ell the angular velocity reaches its maximum and, for short \ell it rapidly decreases. Such behaviour is confirmed by a simple numerical model. The model also predicts that there is a critical rotor size below which it does not rotate. Within the introduced model we analyze the type of this bifurcation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.00491,
  title  = {Relationship between the size of camphor-driven rotor and its angular velocity},
  author = {Yuki Koyano and Marian Gryciuk and Paulina Skrobanska and Maciej Malecki and Yutaka Sumino and Hiroyuki Kitahata and Jerzy Gorecki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.00491},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

9 pages, 8 figures