🔬#MESExperiments 15: Gyroscopes Tend to Rise Until Precession Rate Has Peaked #Interesting

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In #MESExperiments 15 I go over the process of very tediously measuring a gyroscope’s angle of steepness for each precession revolution in order to analyze and learn from the data. This specific gyro test had a starting angle of 65° from the vertical and rose 45° to a final risen position of 20°. I chose this specific gyro experiment to analyze because I wanted to compare the peak risen position with the precession rate or period, which in our case is defined as the number of precession revolutions per time (I used per minute hence RPM).

The data was compiled following Excel spreadsheet and a full discussion is written up in the corresponding Hive post:

Analyzing the data shows that the angle from vertical tends to increase linearly while the precession rate or period increases more rapidly and is akin to an exponential rise. This pattern is followed until the gyro is at its highest risen position. Soon afterwards the gyro starts to descend downwards at a very fast rate and then its falling rate starts to slow down as the angle gets more steep. Likewise, just after the highest risen position the precession rate drops quickly but interestingly is sped back up again followed by a gradual slowing down as the gyro angle gets steeper.

Furthermore, I calculated the angular velocity of the center of mass of the gyro while assuming it was at the center of the gyro rotor. Interestingly, the angular velocity initially increases linearly and at a much less rate than the exponentially rising precession rate. But once the peak risen position is reached the angular velocity spiked very rapidly until it appears to level off at about 3 times the velocity at the risen position.

Note that the length from the stem to gyro rotor, hence the estimated center of mass (COM), is approximately 45 mm and the weight of the gyroscope used in this experiment is 150.68 g with the stem.

These are some very interesting findings which I will explore in further experiments.

Stay Tuned for #MESExperiments 16…