Related papers: Beer Mats make bad Frisbees
A beer bottle or soda can on a table, when slightly tipped and released, falls to an upright position and then rocks up to a somewhat opposite tilt. Superficially this rocking motion involves a collision when the flat circular base of the…
Swirling a glass of wine induces a rotating gravity wave along with a mean flow rotating in the direction of the applied swirl. Surprisingly, when the liquid is covered by a floating cohesive material, for instance a thin layer of foam in a…
The mechanical response of a circularly-driven disk in a dissipative medium is considered. We focus on the role played by viscous friction in the spinning motion of the disk, especially on the effect called reverse rotation, where the…
The effect of undesirable high-frequency free-layer switching in magnetic multilayer systems, referred to as back hopping, is investigated by means of the spin-diffusion model. A possible origin of the back-hopping effect is found to be the…
The bottle-flip challenge -- the upright landing of a partially filled bottle after tossing and flipping it in the air -- unexpectedly became a viral mechanics exercise. Through high-speed visualization, we evidence that fluid content…
The rotation of the casing and rotor of a gyroscope is studied by considering frictional effects. Friction causes the casing to rotate, and over time, air dissipation and friction at the touchpoint gradually stop this rotation. Several…
We report an unexpected reverse spiral turn in the final stage of the motion of rolling rings. It is well known that spinning disks rotate in the same direction of their initial spin until they stop. While a spinning ring starts its motion…
Although it is commonly expected that a metal disk placed on the surface of water will sink, our investigation has revealed a surprising phenomenon: a vertical jet directed onto the disk from above can allow it to remain afloat. This result…
Current theoretical models for the outflows/jets from AGN, X-ray binaries and young stellar objects involve large-scale magnetic fields threading an underlying accretion disk. We suggest that such a disk is subjected to warping instability…
A wind passing over a surface may cause an instability in the surface such as the flapping seen when wind blows across a flag or waves when wind blows across water. We show that when a radially outflowing wind blows across a dense thin…
We present an experimental study of the motion of a circular disk spun onto a table. With the help of a high speed video system, the temporal evolutions of (i) the inclination angle $\alpha$, (ii) the angular velocity $\omega$ and (iii) the…
Several recent studies have suggested that circumstellar disks in young stellar binaries may be driven into misalignement with their host stars due to secular gravitational interactions between the star, disk and the binary companion. The…
Motivated by misaligned discs observed in eccentric orbit Be/X-ray binaries, we examine the evolution of a retrograde disc around one component of an eccentric binary with hydrodynamic simulations, $n$-body simulations and linear theory.…
Enigmatic transitions between spin-up and spin-down have been observed in several X-ray pulsars accreting matter via an accretion disk. In these transitions, the torque changes sign but remains at nearly the same magnitude. It has been…
The phenomenon known as the tennis racket effect is observed when a rigid body experiences unstable rotation around its intermediate axis. In free space, this leads to the Dzhanibekov effect, where triaxial objects like a spinning wing bolt…
We experimentally studied the effect of flexibility on the flow produced by sinusoidally pitching foil in quiescent fluid. The rigid foil produces a weak, divergent and meandering jet. On the contrary, the foil with a flexible flap produces…
A magnetized bead in a magnetic field seeks to minimize its magnetic free energy by aligning its magnetic moment with the field direction and by moving towards the maximum of the field's intensity. However, when the bead is coupled to a…
With hydrodynamic simulations we show that a coplanar disc around one component of a binary can be unstable to global tilting when the disc orbits in a retrograde direction relative to the binary. The disc experiences the largest…
Many different system types retrogradely precess, and retrograde precession could be from a tidal torque by the secondary on a misaligned accretion disk. However, a source to cause and maintain disk tilt is unknown. In this work, we show…
This note adds some critical remarks on the discussion presented in the McDonald's paper ([1]) on stability of steady motion of the well known problem of a disk rolling on a rough horizontal plane.