Tuesday, November 15, 2005
How Spaghetti breaks
In August, Cory linked to a video created by University of Paris scientists who studied the physics of how dry spaghetti breaks. Bend a piece, and it shatters into multiple fragments. This week's issue of Science News takes a deeper look at the problem. Seen here are stills from a high-speed video showing a piece of dry spaghetti pummeled at the top with a metal slug. The spaghetti buckles before breaking. From the article:
LinkBesides explaining a quirk of everyday life, the new studies are improving scientists' grasp of fragmentation—the process by which objects shatter. "Fragmentation is a complicated problem that we still don't understand very well," says mechanical engineer and materials scientist Kaliat T. Ramesh of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Most of us are trying to understand the basic mechanisms involved."
Because spaghetti rods are similar in some ways to a wide variety of brittle objects ranging from industrial cutting tools to body armor, the research may end up elucidating how such structures can fracture and fail. "If we understand how things break, we can build tougher structures," says mathematician Andrew L. Belmonte of Pennsylvania State University in State College.
posted by David Pescovitz at 08:46:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
