English

Pin-Hole Water Flow from Cylindrical Bottles

Condensed Matter 2009-10-31 v1

Abstract

We performed an experiment on elementary hydrodynamics. The basic system is a cylindrical bottle from which water flows through a pin-hole located at the bottom of its lateral surface. We measured the speed of the water leaving the pin-hole, as a function of both the time and the current level of water still inside the bottle. The experimental results are compared with the theory. The theoretical treatment is a very simple one based on mass and energy conservation, corresponding to a widespread exercise usually adopted in university basic disciplines of Physics. We extended the previous experiment to another similar system using two equal bottles with equal pin-holes. The water flowing from the first bottle feeds the second one located below it. The same concepts of mass and energy conservation now lead to a non-trivial differential equation for the lowest bottle dynamics. We solved this equation both numerically and analytically, comparing the results with the experimental data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0005428,
  title  = {Pin-Hole Water Flow from Cylindrical Bottles},
  author = {P. M. C. de Oliveira and A. Delfino and E. V. Costa and C. A. F. Leite},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0005428},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

14 pages, text in TEX, 2 JPG and 7 PS figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T10:03:13.416Z