ABSTRACT
An understanding of fluid jets, in particular, and moving fluids, in general, and the forces they can produce are important to engineers in the design of turbines and in fluids flowing through pipelines. The purpose of this paper is to describe the experimental equipment and its use for measuring the flow rate at which an impinging fluid jet will lift a weighted deflector. The experimental results showed that the calculated jet force ( = ρQv) ranged from 2.4 to 3.7 N (0.54–0.83 lbf) for flow rates ranging from 2.2 to 2.8 m3/hr (9.8–12.2 gal/min or gpm). The jet force was 3.5%–19.8% higher than the calculated force due to gravity based on the mass of the deflector (=mg), indicating that there are experimental errors that must be addressed to improve the agreement between experiment and theory.
