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Avalanches Simulated With 500,000 Ping-Pong Balls
An anonymous reader submits "Ping-pong ball avalanche experiments have been carried out for the last three years at the Miyanomori ski jump in Sapporo, Japan, to study three-dimensional granular flows. Up to 550,000 balls were released near the top of the landing slope. The balls then flowed past video cameras positioned close to the flow, which measured individual ball velocities in three dimensions, and air pressure tubes at different heights. The flows developed a complicated three-dimensional structure with a distinct head and tail, lobes and 'eyes.' See for yourself, it's quite interesting!"
"Hey Bill, we've got tons of ping-pong balls and a very elaborate and sophisticated means of tracking their movement - what should we do with them?"
"Uhh, use them to predict the Powerball results and retire on private carribean islands, unique ones of which we own for every day of the month?"
"No, you fool! Avalanche research is clearly the way!"
The only tragic victim of this experiment was this man.
A bespecticled bunny rabbit and moose were seen running from the scene.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
I hate ping pong avalanches.
The hardest part is digging yourself out with nothing but a ping pong paddle...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
From a recent article in DesignFax Magazine, you might be surprised at the kinds of things you can model using simple bouncing-ball-like objects. Everything from giant dump trucks to laser toner.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
A actual avalanche is orders of magnitude more complicated. It'd probably be easier, and much more informative, to simulate it on a computer, actually.
The same thing could be said about an avalanche relative to most of our fluid dynamics models. It is still orders of magnitude more complicated. Which isn't to say that our models aren't quite accurate, they are. But at the same time, they're merely a 'good enough' oversimplification of what's really going on.
Fluid dynamics are an extremely difficult thing to model, and even more difficult to compute. They could challenge most of the supercomputers on the top500 list.
In fact, the top computer on there, Earth Simulator, (at well over double second place) has one of it's two primary objectives being the calculation of relatively simple fluid dynamics models across the Earth's entire oceans.
So, to put it summarize my point here, the best fluid dynamics models we have are extremely expensive to compute, and they are still not perfect. The best way to better understand, and therefore better model, what is happening, is still to experiment with real physics. This experiment will help us develop faster-but-still-accurate models, or extremely precise models for fluid behavior. Either way, recording the locations of each 'particle' as they flow is actually research and will provide a solid set of data for future research to build on.
Disclaimer: I work in the petroleum industry, and therefore only have experience with extremely high pressure/small scale fluid dynamics. My extrapolations may not hold true to the broader field of fluid dynamics.
Random and weird software I've written.