(this is under heavy construction)
These are the results of Kristin Berry (kree@mit.edu) and Roman Kowch's 2010 Balanced Motion experiment. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about our results or would like our data to analyze on your own.
Read about the general setup of our experiment
This is an example of one of the particles we tracked and selected for analysis. Note that its radius steadily decreases as it spirals inward, as we would expect, but that its path appears to be slightly ellipsoidal and off center, which introduced error into our calculations.
This was our first plot of theoretically predicted Rossby number with our experimental data. Note that the fit is terrible!
If we look at a plot of angular momentum versus radius, we see that it is, in fact, not constant, but varies by
Actually download the data here
Graph of Rossby number using scaled radaii for Gustav (’o’), and the radial inflow experiment
(’x’), and the theoretical prediction (straight line.):
As you can see, they're quite close!