Experiment 2: Fluid Dynamics

Experiment 2:  Fluid Dynamics

The purpose of this experiment was to estimate the diameter of a hole in a bucket filled with water using Bernoulli’s equation.

The velocity form of the equation

  The flow rate equation  

was used to derive the equation for the radius of the hole with the area of the circle:

   .

The set up below was used to measure the time it takes for the bucket of 473mL of water at a height of 1.8 inches. 

Data:

Run	1	2	3	4	5	6
Time to empty(s)	44.85	45.35	44.34	45.67	46.39	46.17
% error	17.3	18.6	15.9	19.3	21.3	20.7

We calculated the theoretical amount of time to be 38.75 sec using the rate equation. To give us the error between each runs..

Analysis

Using the equation above, our calculated diameter was 0.13 inches.  When we measured the hole with calipers, it was .2 inches.  There was a 35% error.  This large error was probably due to the inaccuracy of the timing since we approximated 473mL.