The leaky tank mystery 2024

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Supervisors

Honours students

Project guidelines

General project description

Imagine one of those railcars that has a big horizontal water tank. Pretend it is frictionless. Imagine the tank is full. Imaging there's a hole at the top to let air in. Imagine the tank is leaking through a small hole on the left bottom side of the tank. Assume the jet of water is vertically downward. Does the resulting change in momentum push the railcar to the left or the right?

This is a very famous problem that has never been properly solved. We need finally put it to rest. We will give you papers showing attempted solutions that contradict each other. You may try to search for more papers on the topic.

The experiment is almost impossible to do in practice as the forces are smaller than the friction you get in real life. This explains why there are contradictory solutions. This illustrates an important principle in engineering that your can never be sure of the theory until you do the experiment.

But the modern world of engineering now has simulation tools that we trust and are as good as an experiment provided we don't feed it with wild parameters outside of the range that models are valid.

We want you to do the "experiment" in simulation using Comsol and/or Ansys. The Faculty has licences. Find the answer. Then go and find which theory paper got it correct. Then nicely explain that theory yourself, written out clearly in your own way.

This is a beautiful classic problem and it will be a lot of fun. If you can think of a clever way to actually do a low friction experiment and video it, this will be a cherry on that cake and your name will go down in history. Suggest you design a rectangular tank and suspend it hanging with four cords attached to the corners. You'll need to design a release valve for the water that is actuated by a remote (because you can't touch the tank). Suggest you bounce a laser pointer off the tank as a way of measuring deflection. However, you need to fully simulate the tank first to get all the size parameters right to optimize the size of the deflection.

Specific tasks

List out the specific tasks you need to do to complete this project:

  • etc
  • etc
  • etc

Deliverables

Semester 1

Semester 2

Weekly progress and questions

This is where you record your progress and ask questions. Make sure you update this every week.

Approach and methodology

We expect you to take a structured approach to simulation, theory and experiment.

Possible extension

If you knock off this project too easily, you can extend the work to analysis Feynman's sprinkler.

Expectations

We don't really expect you to find the killer or identify the Somerton Man, though that would be cool if you do and you'll become very famous overnight. To get good marks we expect you to show a logical engineering approach to squeezing information out of the data, and using known good files to always groundtruth each idea.

It is perfectly acceptable to have a long list of ideas that didn't work, provide they are carefully tested in a structured way. Finding things that don't work is part of the scientific process. When we don't know what is supposed to work or not, being able to eliminate ideas that don't work is still very exciting and worthwhile.

  • It is important to regularly see your main supervisors. Don't let more than 2 week go by without them seeing your face briefly.
  • You should be making at least one formal progress meeting with supervisors per month. It does not strictly have to be exactly a month, but roughly each month you should be in a position to show some progress and have some problems and difficulties to discuss. On the other hand the meetings can be very frequent in periods when you have a lot of activity and progress to show.
  • The onus is on you to drive the meetings, make the appointments, and set them up.

Relationship to possible career path

Whilst the project is fascinating as you'll learn about a specific murder case—and we do want you to have a lot of fun with it—the project does have a hard-core serious engineering side. It will familiarize you with techniques in information theory, probability, statistics, programming, bioinformatics, and datamining. It will also improve your software skills. So go ahead and have fun with this, but keep your eye on the bigger engineering picture and try to build up an appreciation of why these techniques are useful to our industry. Now go find that killer...this message will self-destruct in five seconds :-)

See also

References and useful resources

If you find any useful external links and resources, list them here:

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