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A strange request from a strange UF'ie. =)P | by shadowsystems | 2007-02-16 10:49:31 |
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Assuming displacement of water. | by vetitice | 2007-02-16 13:55:57 |
| That reminds me... [RAMBLE WARNING] |
by ayteebee |
2007-02-16 15:13:31 |
...Of one of those weird thought trains that struck me the other day. It went something along the following lines:
A ship displaces a certain mass of water. Warm water is less dense than cold water, so the same ship will displace more volume of warm water than cold water. This will make it settle lower in the water.
Then I thought, could you sink a ship just by warming up the water? Presumably not, because you could only heat the water until it started to boil.
If you could somehow put the ship and some water into a sealed container, pressurise it and then heat it, would that help? The thinking is that water boils at a higher temperature under greater pressure, so we could make the water hotter (and therefore less dense) by raising its temperature more. But would the increased pressure force the molecules closer together again, thus offsetting the benefit bought by raising the pressure?
It was [Oh woot, I just found my Knoppix DVD!] then that I realised that I had finally figured out one of the most fundamental concepts in Physics. Admittedly, I got an A in A-level physics without really understanding it (in fact, I got 100% on one of the papers!), but it bugged me nevertheless. I never understood why gases could be pressurised AND compressed, but liquids could be pressurised and NOT compressed. To me the two were one and the same. Now I realise that pressurising a fluid is literally just increasing its pressure, but compressing it is actually moving the molecules closer together. Presumably pressurising something compresses it to a certain extent because there must be movement between the molecules in order to produce the increase in pressure; but in a liquid there is much less movement compared to that in a gas.
In short, pressurising a fluid results in compression but the compression in a liquid is negligible compared to the compression caused by the same pressure acting on a gas.
So what does this mean for our little battleship? Would the increase in volume caused by heating be offset by the increased compression caused by raising the pressure? Also, the atmosphere surrounding the boat would be easily compressed, so would this allow the water to expand more?
You see what happens to me while the rest of the world sleeps peacefully??
Feel free to discuss/flame/ignore. |
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