07/07/2013
The Physics Behind waterslides
A visitor shoots down a water slide in the re-purposed National Aquatics Center, also known as the Water Cube, in Beijing, China.
How Water Parks Work..????
"A water park is the same thing as any other system out there," points out Eric Martell, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Millikin University. (He studies particle physics and quantum statistics by day, and takes his three young children to water parks on weekends.)
"You start out at the top of the waterslide at rest," he explains. "And then you have some forces acting on you which cause you to accelerate, which means a change in velocity."
He lists the forces acting on riders on a waterslide: gravity, of course, but also the friction between your body and the slide (or the tube you're on and the slide) and how the water interacts with the slide itself.
"Water acts as a lubricant between you and the slide," he says. "But it also pushes you along like a river. And everything that happens to you on a waterslide, it's because of the forces of gravity and friction and the force coming from the interactions between the water and the slide."
That's true for straight sections of a slide, but on a serpentine slide—which whips riders back and forth along curves—there's something else to keep in mind. It's called inertia, and it's the resistance your body has to changing its speed. In other words, each time you reach a curve on a serpentine slide, your body tries to keep going forward. (But if it did, you'd plunge over the edge of the slide.)
"That's why the waterslide has curved sides," says Martell. "Your inertia is trying to take you through the waterslide and out. But instead, you go up the sides of the slides. That's one of the things that has to be figured in—how people of all body types go up the slides."