Rotating Fluids : Hands-on Demonstrations for Graduate and General Education Courses

Rotating tables are useful to demonstrate a variety of geophysical flow phenomena about ocean-atmosphere flows. We discuss a small budget (less than \$4k) effort at UMass Dartmouth that posed the construction and demonstration of a rotating table designed by two students involved in a senior design project in Mechanical Engineering. With suggestions from Jack Whitehead and Keith Bradley at WHOI, Peter Cornillon at URI and Bud Brown at MIT, the students took the table from concept to a working version. The table (60cm in diameter) features a color video camera in the rotating frame of reference and has a dedicated computer to record experiments. It is being used for laboratory demonstrations in general education courses as well as for hands-on projects in a graduate course in Physics and Oceanography.