quote:
Originally posted by Fly-Sig:
That water was moving at very high speed. Someone posted it was supersonic. In any case it was moving fast, which means it had tremendous momentum which takes tremendous force to stop. It would compress the air to a higher pressure than the static water pressure of 5000 psi. Think of that high speed column of water as a piston slamming into the air at the far end of the tube.
The speed of sound in water would be much faster than in air, which we commonly think about. From Wikipedia:
The speed of sound in an ideal gas depends only on its temperature and composition. The speed has a weak dependence on frequency and pressure in ordinary air, deviating slightly from ideal behavior. In colloquial speech, speed of sound refers to the speed of sound waves in air. However, the speed of sound varies from substance to substance: typically, sound travels most slowly in gases, faster in liquids, and fastest in solids. For example, while sound travels at 343 m/s in air,
it travels at 1,481 m/s in water (almost 4.3 times as fast) and at 5,120 m/s in iron (almost 15 times as fast). In an exceptionally stiff material such as diamond, sound travels at 12,000 m/s (39,000 ft/s) – about 35 times its speed in air and about the fastest it can travel under normal conditions.
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