How to Make a Levitating Hot Dog Cooker

[Music] hi everyone in this video i will be showing you one of the weirdest things i have ever featured on this channel this is a levitating hot dog cooker years and years ago i made a short video demonstrating an effect i had recently learned about where you could take an air compressor blow gun and levitate a screwdriver i had just recently learned about this i think maybe from a reddit post and i wanted to film it in slow motion and see if i could figure out what in the world was going on to make this happen i was really surprised that the screwdriver wasn't just blown away by the air it was a really strange effect now years have passed since then and i've since got a better handle on what is happening with this process the primary effect that is causing the levitation is called the coanda effect now this is something that you've probably seen if you've ever tried to pour hot coffee right out of a mug without a spout on it and the coffee just runs right down the side of the mug clinging to that side that is a demonstration of the cowanda effect this happens when you pass a stream of air or any fluid over a curved surface the fluid wants to cling to that surface and it gets redirected let me demonstrate actually i'll demonstrate first with a ping pong ball and this little blow gun hooked up to my air compressor let's see if i can turn this down a little bit all right so there we go you saw that the ping pong ball is levitated in the stream of air when we have the flow of air passing by the curved surface of say this ping-pong ball it clings to that curve and it might be coming out at this direction once it hits the curve it's redirected downwards now there's a couple ways that you can think about the lift that is generated from this effect you can think of it in terms of air pressure or you can think of it more like a rocket and i think a rocket is the more simple explanation to visualize in your head so when you have this stream of air coming out hits that curved surface and then it's redirected downward that downward flow creates an equal and opposite force on the ping-pong ball which lifts it upward now that just tells you that the ball should move up but in this case since this is a curved surface in all directions if the ball moves upward too far it gets out of that stream of air suddenly the stream is passing on the bottom of the ball and being redirected up and it's pulled back down and so you have this effect going on in all directions simultaneously which keeps the ball centered in the airstream in the case of a screwdriver which is only curved on the top and then of course around the the sides of the screwdriver there is no coanda effect happening on the bottom and so what we have instead is a balance of the airflow lifting the driver and gravity pulling it downward if the driver is lifted too high the airflow is no longer passing over the top and so it no longer provides lift and gravity pulls it back down into a steady state of equilibrium where the forces on the driver are equal on all sides so this setup that i have in front of me is inspired by another youtube channel that i absolutely love a channel run by a man named bruce yaney who is an absolute expert at classroom science demonstrations and on his channel he has been demonstrating the kowanda effect and my favorite demonstration is his use of a carrot where the curved top of a carrot makes it able to be levitated by the coanda effect but as soon as you cut the top off it's no longer levitated because there's not a curved surface that the flow of air can cling to it's a really clever demonstration with objects that are just hilarious to see floating in front of a blow gun now in his most recent video he attempted to cook a hot dog well it was in the levitated state using a torch you can see on the top of a hot dog there is of course a curved surface very similar to a screwdriver now what i've done here is instead of using a blowtorch as bruce yaney did in his video i've made an electric coil this is a coil of nichrome wire spun around a stiff piece of copper wire to act as its support because the nichrome itself which is a resistive heating element wire it can't really support itself under weight when the wire is hot it loses a lot of its strength and so i have a stiff copper wire running through its core wrapped in a fiberglass jacket which prevents the copper itself from conducting electricity and stealing some of the heat which really needs to be generated by the electricity only flowing through the nichrome so first things first let's see if i can get this hot dog in a stable state and then we'll turn on the heating element do [Music] well that'll definitely cook it sitting right on the coil but that's not exactly what i was aiming for you might have noticed that the coil actually didn't get all that hot in the top two turns and that's because this flow of air from the blowgun is pulling a lot of fresh air next to it alongside it which is cooling off the upper parts of the coil and i can't actually put the coil any higher in front of the blow gun or else it interferes with the steady flow that keeps this this hot dog stably levitated inside so i might have to stick this in the coil try to cook half of it and then later on flip it over and hopefully it'll still levitate and we can cook the bottom half that was what 10 seconds of levitation it's barely warm with a few scorch marks from where it touched the coil directly let's give it another shot all right here we go and the air compressor will probably turn on in the meantime because this uses a lot of air [Music] do [Music] [Laughter] oh it's hot [Laughter] definitely cooked all the way through hmm another good dog man i keep having to adjust the blow gun because uh as i'm using this the pressure in my air compressor is dropping pretty quickly and so i keep having to turn up the blow gun just a little bit more at a time to keep the dog centered in the coil now unless you have an 80 gallon air compressor in your kitchen this is probably not going to be a very good option for home use however maybe i'll keep it around for my workshop needs so i don't have to go in for lunch this might save me a little bit of time or maybe not it probably takes about one refill of my air compressor to levitate a dog for long enough for it to cook so an 80 gallon compressor one dog per fill not the most efficient device [Music] [Laughter] well who would have guessed that one day i would find myself interested in the aerodynamics of a hot dog i love this sort of demonstration because it opens my eyes to new scientific properties even of everyday objects my sponsor for this video is brilliant a website and app that helps you to achieve your learning goals for me my goals are usually related to math because as someone who likes to invent things math can often tell you if what you want to invent is going to work before you actually go through the trouble of making it brilliance courses on math are really good but if that's not your thing they also have courses in other sciences including computer science all of these courses help you to understand the subjects in the most intuitive way possible with interactive problem-solving in-depth explanations all with the goal of helping you to retain what you learn and often i think you'll find that you have fun doing it it's a great way to sharpen your mind and improve your skill set if you'd like to try brilliant use my link in the video description below brilliant.org forward slash nighthawk for 20 off a premium membership i look forward to reading your comments on this video i still read all of them and i appreciate when you take the time to interact with me thanks for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: NightHawkInLight

Views: 687,328

Keywords:

Id: e1vriaAncQo

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021