It might look like enjoyable and video games, however understanding how dominoes topple isn’t little one’s play.
“It’s a problem that is so natural; everybody plays with dominoes,” says David Cantor, a researcher at Polytechnique Montreal with a background in civil engineering. So Cantor got down to create laptop simulations of a row of dominoes collapsing in a series response.
Domino video games are extra enjoyable with a buddy — and so is analysis on the oblong blocks. Cantor teamed up with a buddy, physicist Kajetan Wojtacki of the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
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Friction is essential for figuring out the pace at which the collapse cascades by way of a row of dominoes, the pair report within the June Physical Review Applied. That consists of each the friction between colliding dominoes, and between the dominoes and the floor they sit on.
The laptop simulations revealed the circumstances wanted for a speedy collapse. Toppling cascaded quickest for carefully spaced dominoes that had little friction between them and that stood on a high-friction floor (SN: 8/1/19).
Less friction between dominoes — as happens for tiles with extra slippery surfaces — means much less vitality is misplaced. And extra friction between the dominoes and the floor they stand on, resembling tough felt, implies that the tiles don’t slide too far backward as they fall. Such backsliding would in any other case sluggish the cascade.
In some simulations, the chain response stopped quick. For occasion, dominoes spaced far aside on a slippery floor backslid a lot they averted hitting one another.
Based on the simulations, the 2 domino dynamos got here up with an equation that predicts the pace of collapse and confirmed that the predictions matched outcomes of earlier experiments. Turns out, there’s critical science behind the satisfying spectacle.