On 05/14/2011 06:12 PM, David Jonsson wrote:
Superrotation is shear flow on gas planets and stars and it requires an
explanation since there appears to be no force or stress to drive them.
Recently I came up with the following idea after having tried two others
with limited success.
Assume that gas or matter flowing along planets' or stars' rotation around
its axis is less affected by viscous drag compared to flow going against
the. This is because of differences in centrifugal acceleration between
these two cases. Matter being less affected by gravity due to centripetal
acceleration pushes less on the underlying matter and will have its viscous
shear stress reduced. In a gas or other fluid with thermal motion there will
be particles moving in any direction and they will be slowed down
differently depending on direction of motion relative the rotational
direction.
Hi David,
There should be (prograde?) super rotation in all planets with a dense
atmosphere, then. Why that is not the case?
How could this be quantitatively determined?
If another more practical and smaller size example helps you to better
imagine the physical situation you can think of a gas centrifuge for uranium
enrichment. There should be high shear flow in that case as well and not as
we are erroneously informed on various places on Internet that there is
solid body rotation. Does anyone here think it is correct to lie about
physics in order to stop understanding of it and thus prevent proliferation
of technologies based on the effect? It is both impressive and disgusting
that someone has been capable of keeping this kind of physics undeveloped
for over a century. It would have been natural to see this combination of
fluid mechanics and thermal physics to appear soon after the appearance of
kinetic gas theory.
I don't think so. The field is probably not very developed because
a) nobody found a concrete application or specific need to study it.
Until now?
b) the equations are hard. Significant progress in The Navier-Stokes is
one of the millennium prizes. See
http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier-Stokes_Equations/
