What Does a Fan Do in a Vacuum Chamber? Weird Results

okay everyone today we're going to be testing what happens to a fan in a vacuum chamber can it still blow stuff around so this has been one of my most requested videos and so I haven't done it yet so I decided that to take the request and see what happens two things in a vacuum chamber when there's a fan blowing on them okay so I have my fan hooked up here and I can actually adjust the speed of it turn it on here and it down so first let's just see what this looks like at atmospheric pressure with these styrofoam beads here these are gonna get everywhere okay here we go okay let's turn on our fan so this is with air let's see how this looks so I'll turn it to 3 volts that's the operating voltage of this fan here so let's just turn it up to 3 volts 3 2 1 it's like a snow machine so pretty cool you can see it actually sucking up the beads through the bottom there and then blowing them around okay let's leave it like that and turn on our vacuum and see how it changes is the vacuum increases ok here we go ok 3 2 1 okay they're already slowing down they're still flying around in there though because staticky they're actually getting oh there they go [Music] [Music] okay so now the movement has stopped in there no beads flying around let's turn up the voltage a little bit see if we spin it a lot faster if we get beads flying around again now this isn't a perfect vacuum there's still tiny amounts of air in here at least less than 0.01 atmospheres in there so there's a tiny bit of air let's see if I can turn the fan up a lot and get some beads to blow around it can already see them swirling around in there [Music] [Music] okay so you can see that even in my vacuum chamber if we turn up the fan extremely high I don't have any don't know how many revolutions per minute it was doing but I over drove it it's supposed to be around three volts I think it got to 17 volts before it finally flew off there but you can see that if you turn it up really high you can get enough drag on those balls that it actually lifts it up and makes it spin around and also once one of them starts moving then it's kind of a cascading effect because they bump other ones and it's not just the air moving on but the fans actually hitting the balls so you can see that's the reason why I'm planets like Mars you can still have wind happening if you remember the movie the Martian you remember that on Mars there was a windstorm that pretty much blew his ship over so even though Mars has a vacuum compared to Earth it actually has a very thin atmosphere it's around 610 Pascal's which is actually a little bit higher pressure than I was achieving in my vacuum chamber here so my vacuum was even able to get to a lower pressure than the pressure on Mars but you could still see that we could form some amount of wind just because this isn't a perfect vacuum but the thing with thinner atmospheres if you want to get something to move or have lift in the thinner atmosphere it takes a lot higher velocity that's because the drag coefficient increases by the square of velocity now if you want to lower pressure than what we've achieved here you need a special vacuum pump call the turbo molecular pump now these pumps only work once you've pumped everything down to an extremely low pressure already and then you turn on the turbo molecular pump and basically how this pump works is it literally just knocks atoms below it what a turbo molecular pump does is it's almost like a jet engine that has stages of these fans turning extremely fast and they're angled so that when they hit an air molecule it knocks it down at an angle and then the next blade catches it and knocks it down and knocks it down and pushes it out the other end with these turbo molecular pumps you can get to around 10 to the negative 9 Pascal's which is an extremely low pressure and thanks for watching another episode of the action lab I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell so you can be notified in my late videos out and thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 2,333,284

Keywords: fan in a vacuum chamber, fan in vacuum, vacuum chamber, the action lab, action lab, martian, wind on mars, pressure, physics, drag coefficent

Id: WRqZsHt0fAw

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020