Coriolis effect When I was in Junior High, I learned about the Coriolis effect in science class.

The Coriolis effect bends the path of wind (or ocean currents) into curves. It's what makes hurricanes rotate like huge pinwheels. It is caused by the rotation of the Earth. That was pretty much the whole 8th grade science class description of the thing. So, just exactly what is the Coriolis effect? How does the rotation of the Earth cause it? What is this thing scientists call the Coriolis force? I have pondered the mysterious nature of the Coriolis effect since 8th grade, 29 years! I've thumbed through numerous science books in a vain attempt to find a simple explanation. I've discovered that science books either:

Tell you to take it on faith that the effect exists. (Implying that it's too complex to discuss at the moment. With a wave of the hand, the author walks right by. Net result...no comprehension; the Coriolis effect is mysterious and inscrutable.) Smother you with pages of complex calculations. (Implying that it's too complex to describe with a simple model. Net result...no comprehension; the Coriolis effect is mysterious and inscrutable.)

After years of head scratching, I finally figured it out for myself...no thanks to any of those science books! I simply had a flash of insight one day. I was in the shower watching the water swirl down the drain, pondering the Coriolis effect for the umpteenth time when it hit me! Guess what I discovered...the explanation is really, really simple! You know, I think a lot of those science books don't bother with an explanation because the authors don't really understand the Coriolis effect in the first place! The other books, the ones with reams and reams of equations, seem to be written by authors that don't have an intuitive feel for the phenomenon...they only understand it on some mechanical level with a blizzard of equations.

An Example of the Coriolis Effect

Common, everyday, plain ol' wind provides a fabulous example of the Coriolis effect. The pressure gradient between centers of high and low pressure causes most wind. If the Earth didn't rotate, the wind would blow directly from the high to low pressure areas in a straight line. However, since the Earth is actually rotating, Coriolis effects cause the wind to instead follow a curved path. In the Northern hemisphere, the Coriolis effect causes winds to swirl counter-clockwise around low pressure centers and clockwise around high pressure areas.

The Rotating Earth

To understand the Coriolis effect you only have to appreciate one simple thing...on a rotating body, the velocity of any particular point on the body depends on the distance of that point from the axis of rotation. Think of a bicycle wheel. As it spins, you notice that a point on the hub moves around very slowly, but a point on the rim is going really fast.

That same thing happens on the Earth. Someone standing on the equator is moving about 1000 MPH faster than someone standing at the North pole. The guy at the equator has to circle the circumference of the Earth (24,901 miles) in one day. He's got to hustle to make it! The guy at the North pole only has to rotate around in a little tiny circle and he's got all day to do it. (So he's going what...maybe 5 feet per hour?)

Now, let's just look at three little slices of the surface of the Earth. We'll take a little circular strip from around the equator, another from around the North pole, and another from somewhere about half-way between (strips A, B, and C below). Each of these little strips is like a Conveyor Belt. Conveyor Belt A moves very slowly, belt C moves about 1000 MPH, and belt B moves at a speed somewhere in between...let's just say 500 MPH.

If you lifted these Conveyor Belts and set them next to each other, you'd see something like this:

Now, let's say you put a pistoleer on Belt A. His task is to shoot at a target you've placed on Belt B, but only when the target enters his sights, directly opposite him. What will happen to the bullet he fires? ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________ Time 1:

___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________ Time 2, FIRE!:

___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________ Time 3:

___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________ Time 4, MISS!:

___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________

If you had been sitting at the target, watching the bullet, it would have looked like it angled away from you to the left, like this:

In fact, the bullet was going in a straight line, but you had a lot of speed and pulled away, putting significant horizontal distance between you and the bullet before it went by. The very same thing happens when a bullet is fired from Belt C towards a target on Belt B. The result looks like this (for the sake of brevity, I'm going to draw it in a compact way this time):

Just as before, if you had been sitting at the target, watching the bullet, it would have looked like it angled away from you, but this time to the right. That's because the bullet was moving much faster to the right than the target, causing it to offset a significant horizontal distance to the right by the time it passed the target:

When you aim straight at something and pull the trigger, you don't expect your bullet to fly off to the left or right like this. It's supposed to go where you point the pistol! The thing making the bullets look like they are deflected is the speed difference between the target and the pistol. By the time the bullet gets to where the target was, that speed difference has either

carried the target out of the way or has moved the bullet way off to one side...it depends on your point of view.

The Coriolis Effect

This illustration with the pistol and target is exactly analogous to the Coriolis effect. It's that simple. In the original example of high and low pressure areas, the high pressure area is like the pistol and the low pressure area is like the target. Air molecules are fired from the high pressure area to the low pressure area, but the points on the Earth where these pressure centers are stationed are moving at different speeds. The air molecules actually miss the low pressure center and this sets up a rotating circulation. Air flowing into a low pressure system from the North misses the low pressure center because that low pressure center is carried further East by the time the air gets there. Air coming from the South again misses the low pressure center because the air itself has been carried further East by it's greater speed.

This illustrates why air circulates counter-clockwise around low pressure centers. By making a few more drawings, it becomes clear why air circulates clockwise around high pressure areas; it's also easy to see why those circulation patterns are reversed in the Southern hemisphere (lows circulate clockwise, highs counterclockwise). Try drawing a few diagrams and see for yourself. Ah, the mysteries of Coriolis effect revealed at last! Of course the pistol model is pretty crude. In the real world, the air molecules don't just get fired at the low pressure center once; their course is continually modified as they swing around the pressure center. It's as if the pistoleer gets a chance to catch the bullet and re-fire it moment by moment. This produces a nice, spiraled path for the air molecule. Air directly East or West of the low pressure center experiences no Coriolis effect because both the low pressure center and the air itself are moving at the same speed (they're on the same Conveyor Belt). You would think the air would fall directly into the low pressure center, right? In the real world it doesn't do that, it continues the original curved course. This is because when air mass arrives at a station exactly East/West, it still has significant Northerly/Southerly momentum. This momentum carries the air mass past the East/West position. It swings to a position North/South of the East/West line, and the Coriolis effect again takes hold.

Note that the degree to which the bullet (or air mass) is apparently deflected depends on the speed difference between the pistol and the target. If the speed difference is high, the bullet will appear to deflect sharply. If the speed difference is low, the bullet will only seem to be deflected a little.

An Interesting Phenomenon
Just as described in the previous paragraph, the greater the speed difference between two points on the Earth, the greater the Coriolis effect. If you calculate the speed of the surface of the Earth at different latitudes, you find that it is related to the cosine of the latitude, like this:

Note that the actual equation for the surface speed of the Earth in miles per hour for a given a latitude is: (circumference of the earth in miles / 24 hours) * COS(latitude) = (24901/24) * COS (latitude) = 1037.5 * COS(latitude) However, the magnitude of the Coriolis effect is dependant on the speed difference, so lets see how the speed changes with latitude. This speed difference is actually related to the sine of the latitude. Below is a graph depicting this:

On this second chart, notice the difference in speed between adjacent latitude belts. The speed difference is small at the equator (0) and quite large near the pole (90). This means the Coriolis effect is small at the equator and increases to a maximum near the poles. So, one can expect wind to flow in nearly straight lines from high to low pressure near the equator. Near the poles, you would expect to see much more significant curvature of the wind streams. Hmmmm...that's an interesting result. Now consider this satellite image of a large low pressure system over North America:

Large low pressure systems are often not circular in shape. In the Northern hemisphere they typically resemble a gigantic number 9. Notice the humongous low pressure system in the middle of the photo...it looks like a big 9. This is caused by the difference in the amount of Coriolis effect across different latitudes. The Coriolis effect is smaller in the Southern part of the low pressure system, so the air mass is bent less and travels in a straighter line. North of the low pressure center, the air mass is bent more strongly by the greater Coriolis effect felt at that latitude. The air mass follows a tighter curve. This gives rise to the characteristic 9 shape. Small low pressure systems that do not span a wide range of latitudes are typically more round in shape, as you would expect.

The Coriolis Force

The Coriolis effect affects every moving object on the surface of the Earth. Whenever scientists and engineers have to deal with objects moving over the surface of the Earth, they have to consider Coriolis effects. For example, Coriolis effects have to be taken into account when firing artillery. If you didn't account for it, the 2000 lb shells from your battleship would fall harmlessly into the sea while your smarter, Coriolis-effect-aware opponent blasted the stuffin's out of you. So, this issue comes up frequently and it's important. The only problem is, in the raw, it's awkward to take Coriolis effects into account during calculations. So, scientists and engineers came up with a handy, easy-tocompute shortcut for accounting for Coriolis effects. They call it the Coriolis force. It's a fake force...it doesn't really exist. It just makes stuff like like artillery trajectory calculations easier to do and more accurate. Specifically, the Coriolis force is:

Fc = 2MV sin()
Where: Fc = Coriolis force in the horizontal plane M = Mass of the object = Angular velocity of the Earth (360 degrees per 24 hours) V = Velocity of the object over the surface of the Earth = Latitude in degrees

Notes:

The Coriolis force acts at a right angle to the direction of motion of the object. It pushes the object to the right in the Northern hemisphere and to the left in the Southern. There is also a vertical component to the Coriolis effect. It varies with the cosine of the latitude, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

When calculating the trajectory of the wind, an ocean current, or an artillery shell, this force is applied like any other force acting on the mass. It neatly accounts for the effect of the rotation of the Earth on the apparent trajectory of the mass. This force was originally defined by Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis, a French mathematician, in 1835, after whom the Coriolis effect is named...of course.

Coriolis Force The Coriolis force is a force which acts upon any moving body in an independently rotating system. The most well known application of the Coriolis force is for the movement or flow of air across the Earth. The effect is named after the French physicist Gaspard de Coriolis (17921843), who first analyzed the phenomenon mathematically. The Earth rotates about its axis from west to east once every 24 hours. Consequently, an object moving above the Earth in a generally northerly or southerly direction, and with a constant speed relative to space, will be deflected in relation to the rotation of the Earth. This deflection is clockwise, or to the right, in the Northern Hemisphere and anticlockwise, or to the left, in the Southern Hemisphere. Moving air undergoes an apparent deflection from its path, as seen by an observer on the Earth. This apparent deflection is the result of the Coriolis force. The amount of deflection the air makes is directly related to both the speed at which the air is moving and its latitude. Therefore, slowly blowing winds will be deflected only a small amount, while stronger winds will be deflected more. Likewise, winds blowing closer to the poles will be deflected more than winds at the same speed closer to the equator. The Coriolis force is zero right at the equator. The Coriolis force only acts on large objects like air masses moving considerable distances. Small objects, for example ships at sea, are too small to experience significant deflections in direction due to the Coriolis Force.

Most people, if asked about the Coriolis effect, would probably say that it had something to do with the direction that water swirls down the sink or in a toilet. The basic principle is related, in that it involves rotation, but the truth is slightly different. The Coriolis effect works on a much larger scale. Named for Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, the French scientist who described the effect in an 1835 paper, the Coriolis effect is commonly defined as the apparent displacement, or movement, of an object from its path due to the rotation of the frame of observation. In this instance, the frame of observation is generally considered to be the Earth, although it can be any rotating body. The key word to consider here is apparent. The Coriolis effect does not actually move an object, nor does the effect depend on an outside force. At its most basic, the Coriolis effect can be said to be caused by inertia, or the tendency of an object to stay in the state of rest or motion it is already in. Definition of Coriolis Effect: (physics) an effect whereby a body moving in a rotating frame of reference experiences the Coriolis force acting perpendicular to the direction of motion and to the axis of rotation; on Earth the Coriolis effect deflects moving bodies to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere Coriolis Effect on wiseGEEK:

The speed of the object being observed also affects the observed displacement. A number of scientific disciplines make use of the Coriolis effect and its permutations. Meteorology, or the science of atmospheric behavior and observation, takes the Coriolis effect into account in studying hurricane formation and movement, while astrophysicists, or scientists who study stars, see it in studying sunspots and other stellar phenomena. Only after several hours of standing can the Coriolis effect overcome other forces, such as the mild current imparted by the placement of faucets. In limited cases, the Coriolis effect is observable completely independent of the Earth as the frame of reference.

Only after several hours of standing can the Coriolis effect overcome other forces, such as the mild current imparted by the placement of faucets. In limited cases, the Coriolis effect is observable completely independent of the Earth as the frame of reference. The Coriolis effect works on a much larger scale. Named for Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, the French scientist who described the effect in an 1835 paper, the Coriolis effect is commonly defined as the apparent displacement, or movement, of an object from its path due to the rotation of the frame of observation. Those who consume caffeine on a regular basis are subject to caffeine withdrawal if they abstain for a day or so. This usually presents as a terrible headache, and excessive sleepiness. Side effects of caffeine withdrawal tend to last for two to three days. Noting the headache caused by caffeine withdrawal led researchers to study the effects of caffeine on those with persistent headaches or migraines. Lorenz had failed to provide a title for his speech. The concept of small variations producing the butterfly effect actually predates science and finds its home in science fiction. Chestnuts can be found for sale in a number of forms, depending on the region of the world that the consumer is in. During the winter, many countries in the Northern

hemisphere have whole fresh chestnuts for sale, but chestnuts can also be found preserved in water or syrup, or ground into flour. Day length at the equator remains stable because the equator is always turned towards the sun, no matter which pole is facing the sun. In June, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun, causing the days to be longer because more of the North is exposed at any given time, while the days in the South are shorter, because less of the hemisphere is exposed to the Sun. A ceiling fan will typically cool off people in a room by pushing air downward to produce a wind effect that cools people off. If you choose a palm ceiling fan that is reversible, then you can make the blades spin the other direction, which draws air upward to help regulate room temperature more effectively in cold weather. Meteorology, or the science of atmospheric behavior and observation, takes the Coriolis effect into account in studying hurricane formation and movement, while astrophysicists, or scientists who study stars, see it in studying sunspots and other stellar phenomena. Ship stability is the performance of a boat in the water in a variety of conditions, including fully laden and in rough seas. Careful thought goes into ship design to maintain stability in adverse conditions, and personnel are also aware of this as an area of concern so they can load their craft appropriately. Steel abrasives of both types are available in a selection of grades which are defined by grain size, hardness and impurity levels. Abrasive blasting is a technique used to achieve a wide range of surface effects on materials as diverse as stainless steel, glass and denim. Mariners found the trade winds of interest both because they could be used to speed sailing to the west, and because they were surrounded by two other interesting wind patterns: the doldrums and the horse latitudes. The doldrums, known to meteorologists as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, are located at the equator, where there are almost no winds at all. Depending on its location, an airport may have wind speed indicators positioned in more than one place. Pilots need both wind speed and wind pattern information for safe take-off and landing. Varying wind speed and patterns may affect flight, especially in areas where mountainous regions surround valleys. I am often asked by students whether their toilet bowls will flush clockwise or counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. This would, of course, be important information if you were ever kidnapped and blindfolded and dropped off in a strange land. If we assume a commode of conventional size, then this "toilet bowl test" will fail because the answer lies in the manufacturer's design. But if your toilet bowl were a few hundred miles in diameter, then the Coriolis force of the rotating Earth would easily overcome the random water currents and force the bowl to empty its contents in a counterclockwise swirl. If you had Southern Hemisphere friends with an equally large toilet, then theirs would indeed empty in the opposite (clockwise) direction. The circulation within oversized flush toilets is a natural consequence of of motion on the surface of an object that rotates. We owe our detailed understanding of the effect to the French engineer and mathematician Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis, who, in 1835, described the laws of mechanics in a rotating reference frame.

Earth's surface is an excellent place to demonstrate why the origin of the Coriolis force is relatively simple. Our planet rotates on its axis approximately once every twenty-four hours. Over that period, objects on the equator travel a circle with a circumference of nearly 25,000 miles, which corresponds to a speed of more than 1,000 miles per hour. By forty-one degrees north, the latitude of New York City and the American Museum of Natural History, the circumference traveled is only about 19,000 miles, and the west-to-east speed is approximately 800 miles per hour. As you continue to increase in Earth latitude (north or south of the equator), your west-to-east speed decreases until it hits exactly zero miles per hour at the poles. (For this reason, most satellites are launched as close to the equator as possible, enabling them to get a good "running start" in their eastward orbits.) Imagine a puffy cloud in the Northern Hemisphere and a meteorological low-pressure system directly to its north. The cloud will tend to move toward the low. But during the journey, its greater eastward speed will enable the cloud to overtake the low, which is itself in motion, and end up east of its destination. Another puffy cloud that is north of the low will also tend to move toward the low, but will naturally lag behind and end up west of the system. To an unsuspecting person on Earth's surface, these curved north-south paths would appear to be the effects of a mysterious force (the Coriolis force), yet no true force was ever at work. When puffy clouds approach a low-pressure system from all directions, you get a merry-goround of counterclockwise motion, better known as a cyclone. In extreme cases, you get a monstrous hurricane with wind speeds upward of a hundred miles per hour. In the Southern Hemisphere, the same conditions will create a cyclone that spirals clockwise. Those in the military who target missiles and artillery shells know all about the Coriolis force and normally calculate the appropriate corrections needed for accuracy. In an embarrassing military moment of World War I, English battle cruisers engaged two German warships at a range of nearly ten miles near the Falkland Islands in the Southern Hemisphere -- but they forgot to reverse their Coriolis correction. Despite this and other gunnery problems, the English eventually won the battle with about sixty direct hits but not before more than a thousand shells had fallen in the ocean. In high school I knew all about the Coriolis force, but I never had the opportunity to test in on something as large as a swimming pool until the summer after my junior year when I worked as a lifeguard. At the midsummer cleaning, I carefully opened the drain valve to the pool and observed the circulation. The water funneled in the "wrong" direction -- clockwise. The last time I checked, I was life-guarding in Earth's Northern Hemisphere, so I was tempted to declare the Coriolis force a hoax. But a fast back-of-the-envelope calculation verified that the difference in Coriolis velocity across the pool was a mere half inch per minute. This is slow. The water currents from somebody just climbing out of the pool or even a gentle breeze across the water's surface would easily swamp the effect, and I would end up clockwise half the time and counterclockwise the other half. To demonstrate the insignificance of the Coriolis force on this scale would have required emptying and refilling the pool dozens of times. But each try would dump 15,000 cubic feet of water and diminish my job security. So I didn't. The air circulation near high-pressure systems, which are inelegantly known as anti-cyclones, is a reverse picture of our cyclone. On Earth, these high-pressure systems are the astronomer's best friend because they typically repel clouds. The surrounding air still circulates, but it does so without the benefit of clouds as tracers. The circulation around low- and high-pressure

systems, known as geostrophic winds, presents us with the paradox that the Coriolis force tends to move air along lines of constant pressure (isobars), rather than across them. Now imagine, if you will, a place that is 1,400 times larger than Earth, has an equatorial speed that is about twenty-five times as fast, and has a deep, thick, colorful atmosphere. That place is the planet Jupiter, where a day lasts just nine hours and fifty-six minutes. Jupiter is a cosmic garden of atmospheric dynamics where all rotationally induced cloud and weather patterns are correspondingly enhanced. In the most striking display of the Coriolis force in the entire solar system, Jupiter lays claim to the largest, most energetic, and longest-lived storm ever observed. It is an anticyclone that looks like a great red spot in Jupiter's upper atmosphere; we call it Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Discovered in the mid-1660s by the English physicist Robert Hooke and, separately, by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini, the feature has persisted for more than 300 years. But it was not until the twentieth century that the modern interpretation of the Spot as a raging storm was supplied by the Dutch-born American astronomer Gerard Kuiper. The Great Red Spot is bigger than Earth, but its size and shape have varied over the years. It lives in Jupiter's southern hemisphere and rotates counterclockwise, which immediately tells us we have a high-pressure system. The coloration, from orange red to a barely visible pale cream, is generally attributed to various concentrations of phosphorus and sulfur compounds. Close-up images from the Voyager flyby missions of the late 1970s revealed a maelstrom of colorful curlicues at the interface of the Great Red Spot and the surrounding atmosphere. There were also strikingly resolved horizontal "belts" and "zones," interlaced with countless smaller cyclones and anticyclones, which give Jupiter the appearance of an archaeological cross section of a Big Mac hamburger, bun included. Above all else, however, the Voyager data posed renewed theoretical challenges. They resolved Jovian features down to twenty miles in diameter -- astonishingly small when one remembers Jupiter's size relative to Earth's. Models of cosmic phenomena are often clean and tidy until they are tested outside of the limits in which they were formulated. When higher image resolution comes along, for example, many models are discarded, others are modified, and some are freshly invented. But jumps in resolution have always been followed by a deeper understanding of the universe. Whatever else a model of Jupiter's atmosphere is designed to explain, it should as a minimum account for basic properties of the Great Red Spot, such as its longevity, its distinguished size, and that it is an anticyclone. An ideal model would be able to account for all atmospheric motion on Jupiter. The tools available to the theorist are Newton's laws of motion as adapted to the properties of gases and liquids -- otherwise known as fluid mechanics. Although little is known about the structure of Jupiter's underlayers, contemporary models do capture the basic feature of the Great Red Spot. Jupiter radiates more heat than it receives from the sun and has enormous interior thermal reservoirs that can drive its atmospheric flow patterns. One source is the radioactive decay of trace elements, while another is the leftover heat from Jupiter's initial contraction from a proto-planetary cloud to a planet in the early solar system. The sustained source of energy for the spot could also (or instead) be tapped from other sources. On Earth, hurricanes are partly driven by the latent heat released to the atmosphere when raindrops condense out of the air. A similar mechanism may dominate in Jupiter's atmosphere as its gases condense toward its liquid interior. The Spot has also been observed (and successfully modeled) to dine upon smaller, turbulent eddies in its vicinity. This cannibalistic behavior is yet another source of energy. Clues to the deeper cloud layers will be gained when the spacecraft Galileo passes Jupiter (in December 1995) and parachutes

a miniprobe that will measure temperature, density, composition, wind speeds, and electrical storms as it descends through the outer atmosphere. For now, there is no reasonable hope of describing every one of Jupiter's surface features in detail. A more realistic approach is to construct an atmospheric model that provides a statistically equivalent picture of Jupiter's surface features. In other words, a model of a Big Mac can approximate all Big Macs even though it may not look like any one in particular. One nagging problem with models that always produce a single, sustained anticyclone is the blunt reality that Jupiter's northern hemisphere is devoid of a twin Great Red Spot. Clearly, if models show that big spots are inevitable, then the north ought to have one, too. Elsewhere in the solar system, the Coriolis force has given rise to what is called Neptune's Great Dark Spot. Like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, it is a southern hemisphere anticyclone of epic proportions with a twin in the north. This is a problem that may require an as-yet-unexplored north-south asymmetry in both Jupiter's and Neptune's internal structure. One way to create such an asymmetry would be a cosmic collision. The July 1994 encounter between Jupiter and the dozens of crumbled comet parts from Shoemaker-Levy 9 left visible and sustained scars on Jupiter's outer gaseous surface. The long-term effects of this impulse of deposited energy remains to be seen. Will the scars form stable new structures among the cloud tops? Or will the scars dissipate completely into the atmosphere? For the moment, feel free to consider the new blemishes to be extra ingredients in your hamburger. For decades in high-purity industries such as pharma, semiconductors and specialty chemical manufacturing, the Holy Grail has been a Coriolis flowmeter that meets USP Class VI for use in ultra-pure measurement applications. Traditional Coriolis flowmeters, with their measurement tubes made from metal alloys, simply cannot meet the requirements of these applications. And for years, the conventional wisdom was that a Coriolis flowmeter with an all-polymer measuring tube was simply not practical. Malema Sensors appears to have changed that. According to Dan Malani, Malema's CEO, the introduction of the CPFM 8800 High-Purity Coriolis flowmeter is a step change in flow measurement for the high-purity flow applications in pharma and semiconductors. "Existing Coriolis flowmeters are unable to serve a large number of applications simply because they contaminate a process fluid with metallic ions," Malani says. "Such applications include many semiconductor fabrication processes, bio-pharmaceutical processes and numerous applications involving aggressive liquids that corrode metals. Many processes inherently contain bubbles and existing flowmeters (including those that operate on the Coriolis principle) simply can't measure liquids under such two-phase flow conditions."

Malani goes on, "We wanted to develop a new kind of Coriolis flowmeter fabricated from PFA (perfluoro alkoxyalkane copolymer), as well as other plastics, to provide a breakthrough solution overcoming such limitations of traditional Coriolis flowmeters." Alan Young, Malema CTO (and a founder and vice president of R&D at Exac Corp.), is the design lead for the CPFM 8800. "The design of an all-plastic Coriolis flowmeter was considerably more challenging than designing one from metal," he says. "Our patent-pending flow sensor and its methods of manufacture do not employ any tubing, metal or plastic liners, and required the development of a solid, one-piece structure using several new manufacturing technologies in order to fabricate a complete flow sensor. All wetted components are fabricated from PFA." Young continues, "The sensor design, while scalable to larger flow rates, allows measurement of mass flow rates as low as 5 grams per minute. Sensor flow paths are currently U-shaped, but sensors with different flow paths are under development. The unique design of the supporting electronics preferentially locks on to the sensor's operating frequency and, unlike conventional Coriolis flowmeters, measures the sensor's Coriolis response continuously." Young also noted that the CPFM 8800 measures two-phase flow with gas volumetric void fractions as great as 30%. The CPFM 8800 is supplied in two versions, with four maximum measurement ranges, from 5-1500 g/min to 60-5000 g/min, and varying zero offset stability from 0.06 g/min to 7.0

g/min, depending on the model and flow range. The pressure drop at maximum flow range is quoted at 10 psi on water at 1 cP. Accuracy quoted is (1% of reading + 3 g/min), which compares favorably with other Coriolis flowmeters. Operating temperature is 15C to 40C, and maximum operating pressure is 80 psig. A 3/8-in. tube connection is supplied as standard. Consult the factory for non-standard temperature, pressure and connection designs. The wetted material of the flow tube is DuPont Teflon PFA 450 HP and meets USP Class VI for purity. The flowmeter is supplied with both a 4-20 mADC analog output and digital I/O. The current loop drives 500 maximum load. The digital I/O can be configured as a frequency output (highest accuracy analog output) or as straight digital I/O. The frequency output is 0-10 KHz proportional to flow rate. Tests of the CPFM 8800 as a mass flow controller are currently ongoing at customer sites. Operator parameter configuration is through a USB interface with a PC or laptop. The transmitter may be mounted up to 30 meters maximum cable distance to the sensor. The CPFM is available in unrated general-purpose enclosures. with IP-rated enclosures forthcoming. For more information, contact Malema Sensors: www.malema.com or call +1-408-970-3419.

The Coriolis Force Anything moving on the Earth experiences a deflection caused by the Earth's spin. In the northern hemsiphere, an object is deflected to the right of the direction it is moving. In the southern hemisphere the object is deflected to the left. The strength of the deflection depends on the speed of the object's motion and its latitude.

Faster objects are deflected more strongly. The deflection is strongest at the poles and is zero at the equator.

The result of the Coriolis effect is that objects set in motion travel along a curve as seen on the spinning Earth. That curve arises because the Earth's surface rotates under them, as you can see in the following short animations. Hold a ruler or other straight object along the particle track to see that it moves in a straight line. Note, however, that the path it traces on the Earth's surface is a curve. The following short movie shows how an object moving in a straight line through space travels along a curved path with respect to the Earth's surface. Simple animation of Coriolis Effect for a particle moving away from the pole. Animation of Coriolis Effect for a particle moving away from the equator.

Site web: http://coriolis.legi.grenoble-inp.fr The Coriolis rotating platform, 14 m in diameter, is the largest turntable in the world. Its total weight is 150 tons, and its rotation period can be set with high stability (dT/T = 10-4) between 30 and 1000 s and can be modulated by computer control in order to generate permanent or oscillating circular flows, so to simulate tidal effects for instance. The platform is equipped with a tank of 13 m diameter and 1.2 m height. It can be filled with homogeneous or density stratified water with any vertical profile (e.g. multilayer or linear). Various fixed or moving obstacles can be installed in the tank (transverse channel 10 m long and 4 m wide, annular shelf, oscillating plates, towed cylinder, cylindrical plunger ). All the instruments, including lasers and computers, stay on the platform, where electricity, water and computer network are available, like in an ordinary laboratory. Researchers can stay on the platform during rotation. Many operations are then easier than in a small rotating tank. Thanks to the large dimensions, large Reynolds number (inertia/viscous friction) can be reached, and Rossb Coriolis meters: how they work When explained clearly, Engineers will have no intellectual problems understanding the physics behind coriolis mass flow measurement. Engineers are more often than not, hands-on people who like to touch and feel something, and see it work, for a more intuitive understanding. Seeing is believing. The Coriolis Effect Here is a simple experiment that tells you everything you need to know about a coriolis meter and which will help us understand the approach to multi-functionality. Do this now, then come back and read some more. 1. Go and find a garden hose. 2. Set the flow running quite fast. 3. Now make a generous loop in the hose and hold it loosely in both hands where the hose ends cross. 4. Get your assistant to take the bottom of the loop in two hands and raise it till the loop is horizontal. 5. Now ask your assistant to let go of the loop cleanly i.e. without imparting any twist, while you continue to hold the other side of the loop. The loop will now swing back toward the vertical. Does it twist as it goes? Does the twist accentuate as the loop accelerates? Thats it. Hang on, what about frequency?

What about it? Frequency has nothing to do with the coriolis effect. Well O.K. let us see where frequency enters the picture: Before we let go of the hose, let us try one more experiment and see what else we can deduce: 1. Send your assistant to stop the flow through the loop, let the loop hang vertically 2. Now start to swing the loop gently backwards and forwards. 3. Now get your assistant to turn on the water back on and watch what happens. Does the loop twist? Adjust the flow rate. What happens to the twist? The physics will confirm that it is the mass rate that is important, rather than the volume rate. Incidentally, you might notice that with no flow, your loop isnt quite flat. This is the zero error and this initial twist can vary if the manufacturer is not careful. Early meters required periodic measurement of the zero flow twist to compensate the phase angle measurement.) We can see that the meter works, and how it works. The physics will explain why. If you want the physics, visit the manufacturers web sites. This description is one of the most clean and comprehensible: (http://www.automationtechies.com/sitepages/pid1353.php) Summary: For a given tube:

the amount of twist is a function of the flowrate the amount of twist is also a function of the velocity at which the tube moves perpendicular to the flow

Frequency has nothing to do with the coriolis effect. The first experiment showed that. The second part of the experiment is a vital part of constructing a practical process device. Imagine:

If you can imagine being able to rotate this loop about an axis at a constant speed you will comprehend that that is all you need to generate the twist effect. Frequency has nothing to do with coriolis mass flow rate measurement,

A rotating loop isnt very practical when we substitute metal tubes for the rubber hose and so, even though we use thin wall tubes and a very flexible geometry, we still have a much stiffer system with a very small amount of twist. We want a continuous measurement but not to introduce rotating unions nor to take up a large volume of space with a spinning loop. We decide that instead of imparting a continuous angular momentum, if we can vibrate the tube at a particular frequency, we will develop a varying twist where the degree of twist is a function of where the tube is in the excitation cycle. Instead of measuring the twist, we now measure the phase difference between two sides of the loop. Because it is most energy-efficient way to drive the system, it is driven at the resonant frequency. Frequency has nothing to do with the Coriolis effect. It just happens to be a convenient way to operate an industrial mass flow meter. There is no such thing as a Coriolis density meter. This term is poor science and engineering despite it being found in an ISA instruments

handbook as a collective term for all vibrating element density transducers, whether they measure mass flow or not. A more correct description for vibrating element density meters can be taken from the prior API standard where they are described as Digital Density Meters, a term this author prefers and extends to some vibrating element viscosity meters. Now see the FAQs on Digital Density meters and Vibrating element Viscosity meters. Most long range shooters are aware of the effects of gravity, air resistance (drag) and wind on their bullets trajectory. There are many commercial ballistics programs on the market that do a fine job of predicting trajectories which only account for gravity, drag and wind. Gravity drag and wind are the major forces acting on a bullet in flight, but theyre not the only forces. In this article, Ill explain some of the more subtle forces that influence the path that bullets take. Gyroscopic drift and Coriolis acceleration is the subject of this article. These effects are commonly misunderstood by many long range shooters for a couple reasons. The first reason is because their effects are small in comparison to other factors. Secondly, the theory behind them can be difficult to understand. Big or small, understood or not, these influences affect every trajectory in a predictable way. Ill try to explain where these forces come from, what practical consequence they have on your trajectories, and what you can do to predict and correct for them.

Gyroscopic (spin) Drift First, a quick fact about spinning objects Picture a spinning object like a bullet or a top. The spinning thing has a spin axis, about which its spinning. If you try to disturb the spin axis by applying a force, or a torque to that axis, the spinning object reacts in a strange way. Rather than simply moving in the direction that you pushed it, the spin axis reacts by moving 90 degrees from the applied force, in the direction of rotation. In other words, if you have a top spinning clockwise on the table in front of you, and you push the top of its stem straight away from you, the stems first reaction is to jump to the right. After the initial reaction, it will precess into its new equilibrium. Now, on to bullets.

Consider a bullet fired at some angle on a long range trajectory. The bullet starts out with its spin axis aligned with its velocity vector. As the trajectory progresses, gravity accelerates the bullet down, introducing a component of velocity toward the ground. The bullet reacts like a spiraling football on a long pass, by 'weather-vaning' it's nose to follow the velocity vector, which is a nose-down torque. The price you pay for torqueing the axis of rotation is that the nose points slightly to the right as it 'traces' to follow the velocity vector. This slight nose right flight results in a lateral drift known as gyroscopic drift.

Having a left or right twist will change the direction of gyroscopic drift. Bullets fired from right twist barrels drift to the right, and vise versa by the same amount, typically 8-9 inches at1000 yards for small arms trajectories. Gyroscopic drift is an interaction of the bullets mass and aerodynamics with the atmosphere that its flying in. Gyroscopic drift depends on the properties (density) of the atmosphere, but has nothing to do with the earths rotation.

Coriolis Acceleration Accelerations due to the Coriolis Effect are caused by the fact that the earth is spinning, and are dependant on where you are on the planet, and which direction you're firing. It breaks down like this: There are horizontal and vertical components to Coriolis acceleration. The Horizontal component depends on your latitude, which is how far you are above or below the equator. Maximum horizontal effect is at the poles, zero at the equator. The horizontal component doesn't depend on which direction you shoot. Typical horizontal Coriolis drift for a small arms trajectory fired near 45 degrees North Latitude is about 2.5-3.0 inches to the right at 1000 yards. The Vertical component of the Coriolis effect depends on what direction you shoot, as well as where you are on the planet. Firing due North or South results in zero vertical deflection, firing East causes you to hit high, West causes you to hit low. The vertical component is at a maximum at the equator, and goes to zero at the poles. Typical vertical deflection at 45 degrees North (or South) latitude for a 1000 yard trajectory is the same as for the horizontal component: +2.5 to 3.0 inches (shooting east), or -2.5 to 3.0 inches when shooting west.

What are the consequences? So those are the facts. But what does all this mean, practically, to long range target shooters? The answer lies in understanding the following: The effects of gyroscopic drift and Coriolis drift are independent, and cumulative. In other words, they add, and you can make them add up in more or less favorable ways. For example (typical 1000 yard small arms trajectory), if you always shoot in the northern hemisphere where the horizontal drift is always to the right, and you have a right twist barrel as most of us do, then your bullet will drift to the right approximately 9" due to gyroscopic drift, and an additional 2.5" due to Coriolis, resulting in 11.5" right drift, even in zero crosswind. However, if you had a left twist barrel in the northern hemisphere, gyro drift and Coriolis drift would partially offset each other, resulting in only 6.5" drift to the right. What's that mean practically, to competitive target shooters? I can think of only one answer: Long range prone shooters (perhaps some BR shooters as well) like to set a "zero wind" value on their sights as a reference point. If this zero wind setting is

determined for a 100 yard zero, then it will be wrong for longer ranges. The difference between the left and right twist barrel means that the long range, no wind zero will be off by either 1/2 or 1 MOA due to the combined effects of gyroscopic and Coriolis drift. Considering this, it would be more beneficial to have a left twist barrel. Having said that, I wouldn't order a special made barrel for that reason. It might cost more, and I'm more comfortable letting the barrel makers do what they're more comfortable with. I'd do the math and adjust my long range zero wind setting before I'd special order a left twist barrel. Furthermore... As the most precise shooters on the planet, BR shooters are allowed sighters, before they begin their record shots. Allowing sighters gives BR shooters the luxury of 'dialing out' all these small components of deflection that are different on different ranges, etc. So BR shooters dont really have to understand, or care about the effects. However, long range hunters and snipers are people who have more of an interest in having the very first shot hit the point of aim (they require precision AND accuracy). Therefore, I think that those people may be more interested in understanding and correcting for such effects as gyroscopic drift and Coreolis drift. Of course, it may not be worth it to carry around the flushing toilet thats required to measure the strength of the Coriolis effect that day Regardless of how the effects add or subtract from each other, these effects are knowable, and therefore correctable by anyone who understands and accounts for them. To my knowledge, there are no commercial ballistics programs (affordable to the average shooter) that calculate gyroscopic drift. It depends on a number of aerodynamic coefficients that are not easy to calculate. However, the good news is that gyroscopic drift is relatively constant for a wide range of small arms calibers and flat fire (less than 10 degrees) trajectories. You can count on no more than 10 to 12 inches at 1000 yards. As for Coriolis acceleration, you can look that up in physics books, or ballistics books like Modern Exterior Ballistics. I have an idea for how one might alleviate some of the hassle caused by gyroscopic and Coriolis drift. Since most of us live in the Northern Hemisphere, and most of us use right twist barrels, we suffer the unfortunate consequence that the gyroscopic drift, and the lateral component of the Coriolis drift compound each other. Most of us probably have at least 1 MOA of drift to deal with on our sights between short and long range wind zeros. I havent done the math on this yet, but it seems that you ought to be able to figure out the correct degree of cant at which to mount your scope, that will counteract the effects of drift. The angle should be very small, as to be indiscernible by the shooter. I doubt you would get it to work out perfectly for all ranges, but you might be able to get it good enough. This practice can also be applied to iron sights by mounting your level at a small angle to level. Some day Ill have to do the math on that one. If youre interested in seeing worked examples of calculating Coriolis drift, see the following links:

Can You Detect The Coriolis Effect in your Sink?

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, University of Sydney, Australia Chris - What we've been doing this evening is asking people all around the East of England to fill sinks and baths with water, pull out the plug and see which way the water swirls down the plug hole. We've got a mixture of results this evening, but is this experiment actually possible? Can we detect the spinning of the Earth using this approach? Karl - You can get it to work. However, you're looking at a thing called the Coriolis force, which is actually angular momentum under a different name. The Coriolis force on the small bodies of water you're working on is roughly 10 million times smaller than the gravity force, so you really need to do the experiments delicately. Let's just back up a bit here. The thing about angular momentum is the same as when ice skaters go faster when they pull their hands into their body. They speed up because they bring more of their mass to the spin axis of the body. If you think about the Earth spinning, at the equator it's a long way from the spin axis, and at the poles it's right on the spin axis. If you get a storm brewing just above the equator, they spin and move away from the equator towards the poles. As they do so, they head towards the spin axis of the Earth. There's a bit of angular momentum that needs to be accounted for. If you do the equations, this leads to clockwise rotation of a hurricane in the southern hemisphere and anticlockwise rotation in the northern hemisphere. But here you're looking at something tens or hundreds of kilometres across. How can you hope to see that

same effect in a tiny tub? The answer is that if you do the experiment very carefully, you should be able to see it. This has been done once or twice. Chris - So it is possible? Karl - Yes. In a fine journal called Nature in 1962, there was a paper by Shapiro who did the experiment at MIT. A few years later at the University of Sydney, also published in Nature, a paper by Trefethen in 1964 about the bath tub vortex in the Southern hemisphere. What you do is get a special bath tub, which is two yards across, six inches deep and has a tiny tiny central hole. You put a cork there so you can see which way the water's going. You let the water settle for a day or two so you lose all the residual spin from putting it in there and then you open the drain plug. The water begins to flow out very slowly and nothing very significant happens for about twelve to fifteen minutes. At around that stage, you can begin to see the cork take on a clockwise or anticlockwise rotation depending on your hemisphere. It happens slowly at first and then increases to one rotation every four seconds by the end. Shapiro wrote that when all the precautions prescribed were taken, the vortex was invariably in the anti clockwise direction. Soif you're a fair way away from the equator and you it carefully, you can see it. However if you just rush off the plane at Singapore which is one degree from the equator, and the surface of the Earth is about parallel to the spin axis, put some water in an oval bowl and pull the plug straight out, you're only going to see local effects. Chris - So in other words, Michael Palin was fooled into thinking this was true at the equator. Karl - Mate, there's an old Polish saying. If you've got a dog, don't bark. It's fairly obscure, but what it means is stick to your speciality. The number of areas of ignorance we have are huge. In this particular case in the TV series Pole to Pole, Michael Plain meets a man called Michael McCleary, who says that this line here on the ground is the equator. He has a little square tub which he's holding in his hands with floating matchsticks. He then walks off in one direction and spins as he turns around to face the tourists. That gives a spin to the water. He takes his finger off the bottom and you can see the matchsticks going round clockwise or anti clockwise as he's being told. Poor Mr Palin is being conned! Chris - It just goes to show that even the great Michael Palin can be conned sometimes. Thanks very much for joining us Dr Karl and helping us to avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water and debunking the myth of the Coriolis effect and how it effects spin when water goes down the plug hole.

I like this

December 2005