- #1
SW VandeCarr
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Consider a 10 m/sec wind blowing against a perfectly rigid wall. I want to calculate the pressure the wind produces on the wall. I'm ignoring the details of the actual physics of compression and turbulence. I'm reducing the problem to one cubic meter of (incompressible) air with a mass of 1.2 kg striking one square meter of a perfectly rigid wall surface.
An analytic solution doesn't seem to work since the pressure goes to infinity as the time approaches zero. However it turns out that the dimensions of pressure (P=M(L^-1)(T^-2)) are equivalent to the dimensions of energy density, although the former is a vector while the latter is a scalar. Assuming they are equivalent, the kinetic energy density is (1.2)(100)/2=600 joules/m^3 which which would be equivalent to 600 Newtons/m^2.
I know you need to be careful with units of measurement when dealing with a combination of vector and scalar quantities. Is this a valid way to go about the problem or have I missed something obvious?
An analytic solution doesn't seem to work since the pressure goes to infinity as the time approaches zero. However it turns out that the dimensions of pressure (P=M(L^-1)(T^-2)) are equivalent to the dimensions of energy density, although the former is a vector while the latter is a scalar. Assuming they are equivalent, the kinetic energy density is (1.2)(100)/2=600 joules/m^3 which which would be equivalent to 600 Newtons/m^2.
I know you need to be careful with units of measurement when dealing with a combination of vector and scalar quantities. Is this a valid way to go about the problem or have I missed something obvious?
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