Dippy Bird Carnot Cycle

Dippy Bird Carnot Cycling

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Dippy Bird and the Carnot Cycle
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Physics of the Dippy Bird (B. Houghton's expired web site)

Here is the Carnot Cycle of a heat engine and the Drinking Bird. Before going to the next pages, try to figure out:

1a) How reciprocal exchange of chlorofluorocarbon gas between top (cooled by evaporation) and bottom (room temperature) is the central phenomenon in the cycling of the bird,

1b) Where heat cycling occurs and what happens when the heat cycles get out of sync,

1c) How to measure the temperature difference between the bulb and head (alarmingly simple and cheap to do),

2) How the Bird exhibits chaotic cycling,

3) How to record the Bird's behavior so that you can compute its angular momentum, velocity of each dip, and other cool quantitative stuff...

4) How many ways the Bird as a system open to environmental influences departs from the ideal behavior of the Carnot cycle.

There is a former Dippy Bird Web site preserved HERE, with more technical info on how the Bird is constructed (including a few comments by me) and on its mechanics. Houghton is HERE for now (keeps moving his site around since 1992...)

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