Hey Ray: 'The Magic Screwdriver'
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - Sometimes you come across things on social media, and you wonder if they are real or not.
There was a video I came across that showed a person with an air compressor blowing air on a screwdriver, and that screwdriver levitated.
It looked really weird.
To be honest, my dramatic recreation is just recreating the scenario. I took an air compressor, set the pressure to 120 PSI, and blew the air on the screwdriver at an angle, and the screwdriver just levitated.
That video was, in fact, real!
If you remember back to one of our first experiments, we showed you Bernoulli's Principle.
To do that we used a ping pong ball and a hair dryer.
That hair dryer and the ping pong ball did the same thing.
The ball levitates, even if you aim the hair dryer at slight angles. If you remember from this experiment, As the stream of air from the hair dryer hits the bottom of the ping-pong ball, the speed of the air increases to get around the sides of the ball. As that velocity goes up, the pressure above the ball goes down, causing low pressure above the ball.
This means the ball is actually being lifted because of that low pressure!
The screwdriver isn't round, but it does have a curved surface, the handle. That curved surface is all you need for this. As the air blows across that, it creates the same area of low pressure, causing the screwdriver to levitate! You can actually do this with other items with rounded surfaces, too.
