Water Bottle Cannon
Download Clip (504 Kb)
By
capping a water bottle and twisting the bottle in half, you can build
sufficient pressure in the bottle to launch the cap. When the bottle
is twisted, the volume gets cut in half. This increases the pressure,
since pressure is inversely proportional to volume. When the cap is
quickly twisted off, it shoots about 10 meters. To capture this video
clip of the cap initially launching, the high-speed camera was recording
at a framerate of 2000 frames/sec and a shutter speed of 4X, or 1/8000th
of a second.