The Effect of Viscosity of Hydraulic Machines

Overview

Objectives My objective was to discover if the viscosity of liquid impacts the effectiveness of a simple hydraulic system. Methods In this project, I used 4 liquids of different viscosities, water, vinegar, diluted soap, and vegetable oil. I set up a simple hydraulic system using 2 200mL syringe and plastic tubing and filled up one syringe with a liquid. I placed a weight on top of the syringe and timed how long it would take for the other syringe to be completely filled, and repeated this 5 times with each liquid and found the average. Results The less viscous a liquid was, the more speedily the hydraulic system operated, which supported my hypothesis. Vinegar had an average of 3.692 seconds, water, 4.046, the soap had an average of 4.294 and vegetable oil was 9.07, which corresponds to their respective viscosity orders. Conclusions Using my data, we can conclude how to utilize liquids' viscosities in hydraulic systems without using excess electricity. In order to control a hydraulic machines speed just by using a liquid, we can change use a hydraulic fluid of a corresponding viscosity to the speed, like using a very viscous liquid to make the system move slower. Also, we could even incorporate force multiplier to utilize this concept even more, which shows that if we use a small syringe to apply force to a larger one, the force will become greater in order to keep the pressure constant throughout the system.

Competition history

• CSEF 2019 Physics & Astronomy · Entry J1714

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Physics and Astronomy projects
• CSEF Physics and Astronomy projects
• Every CSEF 2019 project