Flutter and Tumble: The Physics of Falling Paper
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 8:45 am
hi,
isn't it amazing that such everyday thing is still a mystery for today's physics, but better than trying to explain let me just point this interesting article:
http://www.aip.org/png/html/paper.htm
and this page:
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/complex/EMose ... index.html
- is anyone working on anything related to this?
- is this something that could be part of Bullet Physics library?
"How paper falls to the ground is a process impossible to describe exactly with the laws of physics"
- are you kidding me?! ...i refuse that!
flutter/tumble motion actually looks pretty regular to me,
why in a world would it be so difficult to approximate and somehow simplify this? if you asked me a few hours ago i would say - that's easy, and go on to assume its similar to calculating a lift with *simplified formula* for airfoil, where you calculate lifting force by taking into account horizontal speed, mass, air density, angle and surface area of the wing... pretty simple, only in the case of the falling paper there would also be some *rotational motion* as a result beside 'slide' (lift) ...then feed new angle with the rest of the changes back to calculate new frame and so on... or so it would seem
really, how hard could it be?
...to plug in some coefficients and 'magic numbers' to simulate this, and so my last question is: how accurate or how visually convincing simulation of this should be in order to be considered to be included in Bullet physics?
cheers
isn't it amazing that such everyday thing is still a mystery for today's physics, but better than trying to explain let me just point this interesting article:
http://www.aip.org/png/html/paper.htm
and this page:
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/complex/EMose ... index.html
- is anyone working on anything related to this?
- is this something that could be part of Bullet Physics library?
"How paper falls to the ground is a process impossible to describe exactly with the laws of physics"
- are you kidding me?! ...i refuse that!
flutter/tumble motion actually looks pretty regular to me,
why in a world would it be so difficult to approximate and somehow simplify this? if you asked me a few hours ago i would say - that's easy, and go on to assume its similar to calculating a lift with *simplified formula* for airfoil, where you calculate lifting force by taking into account horizontal speed, mass, air density, angle and surface area of the wing... pretty simple, only in the case of the falling paper there would also be some *rotational motion* as a result beside 'slide' (lift) ...then feed new angle with the rest of the changes back to calculate new frame and so on... or so it would seem
really, how hard could it be?
...to plug in some coefficients and 'magic numbers' to simulate this, and so my last question is: how accurate or how visually convincing simulation of this should be in order to be considered to be included in Bullet physics?
cheers