Analyzing Parabolic Dry Cavity Collapse Using Balloon Animals (2023)

Undergraduate: Luke Meyer

Faculty Advisor: Roberto Camassa
Department: Mathematics

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From previous experiments and mathematical models, we know that spherical dry cavities have a collapse time that depends only on the curvature of the cavity. This time, we examined a one-dimensional parabolic structure using a long twisting balloon, which is ellipse-cylindrical --- forming dry cavity consisting of many parabolae. Similar to the spherical dry cavity, we observed that the collapse time of the parabolic cavity is proportional to the inverse square root of the dry cavity's curvature, gamma, but it will be necessary to take more data points to verify our preliminary observations.

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