15/03/2012
"The Beautiful, Deadly Vortex That Tears Huge Buildings Apart!!"
The Karman Vortex Street isn't someplace you'd want to take up residence — it's literally the path of destruction, where buildings collapse and destruction reigns. Unfortunately, under the right conditions, a Karman Vortex can follow you.
Find out how this beautiful phenomenon can take down anything in its path.
Theodore von Karman, a Hungarian physicist, spent much of the first decade of the 1900s trying to figure out why certain things — airplane wings, bridge supports, buildings, and submarines — would suddenly and spontaneously begin to vibrate. The vibration, once started, would often amp up and up until the entire structure would spin out of control or fall apart. This, understandably, was a major problem.
Karman's first insight was that the closer to cylindrical the object's shape was, the more it tended to vibrate. His second insight led him to turn away from the actual object and toward its medium. And after looking at the medium that moved over these objects, he noticed something.
