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1.16 Bicycle Wheel Gyroscope

A bicycle wheel attached to a wire with a fishing line swivel and suspended from a support makes an impressive gyroscope.

MATERIALS bicycle wheel gyroscope1 stainless steel wire fishing line swivel rotating stool or platform2 or swivel chair (optional) hand-held barbells (optional) suitcase with internal gyroscope (optional)

PROCEDURE Take out a bicycle wheel and ask who has one of these at home. All the children will immediately recognize it and will wave their hands. Point out that it is a bicycle wheel, but it is a special one because it contains concrete. Spin the bicycle wheel up to high speed by hand or with a rope, and suspend it from the ceiling by a wire with a fishing line swivel attached to one end of its axle [13]. The concrete gives the wheel more angular momentum and makes the demonstration more dramatic. The fishing line swivel allows it to precess. As the gyroscope precesses, you can make its axis bob up and down in a motion known as nutation. If a bicycle wheel gyroscope is not available, you can show the same effects on a smaller scale with a toy gyroscope or even a toy top [4]. Ask a strong volunteer from the audience to hold the spinning bicycle wheel by one end of its axle horizontally at arms length and then raise it vertically over his head, first with the wheel not spinning and then with it rotating rapidly. It is very difficult to do this without a bit of practice. Mount a spinning gyroscope inside a suitcase to provide a
Available from American 3B Scientific, Arbor Scientific, Carolina Biological Supply Company, Fisher Science Education, Frey Scientific, Klinger Educational Products, PASCO Scientific, Sargent-Welch, and Science First 2 Available from American 3B Scientific, Arbor Scientific, Carolina Biological Supply Company, Fisher Science Education, Frey Scientific, PASCO Scientific, Sargent-Welch, and Science First
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1.16 Bicycle Wheel Gyroscope

particularly spectacular and unforgettable demonstration to the person who tries to turn abruptly while carrying the suitcase. Hold the bicycle wheel in your hands while sitting on a rotating stool or swivel chair or while standing on a rotating platform [57] to illustrate Newtons third law of motion (action and reaction) and the conservation of angular momentum. You can make the stool rotate one direction or the other by turning the axis of the bicycle wheel in different directions. While standing on the stool, hand the wheel to someone standing on the floor who inverts it and hands it back to you. You then invert it again, and hand it back to the person on the floor who inverts it again and so forth until the stool spins quite rapidly. The bicycle wheel is imparting quanta of angular momentum to you. Merry-goround music works well here. The rotating platform can serve to demonstrate the conservation of angular momentum using a pair of hand-held barbells [8]. Start with the barbells at arms length and have someone give you a gentle spin. Then pull the barbells in toward your body to make yourself spin faster. You can slow down again by extending your arms. This effect is familiar to anyone who has observed a figure skater doing spins on the ice. As the moment of inertia changes, the angular velocity must also change so as to keep their product (the angular momentum) constant. You can also demonstrate the coriolis force by showing that as you relax your arms and let them fall toward your body while rotating on the platform, one arm goes forward and the other backwards [9]. The gyroscope has many interesting properties. You can show that its axis will remain horizontal so long you allow it to precess. When you stop the precession, it falls. You must apply the force required to make it move in a particular direction at right angles to that direction. When swung like a pendulum, the wheel tends to remain in a plane. This is the principle of inertial guidance of rockets, the gyrocompass, and other navigational instruments [10]. It is also the reason a spinning football is more stable and easier to catch. You can point out that the gyroscopic action of the wheels is one reason a bicycle remains upright. In that case there is no precession since the wheel is suspended from its center of gravity. You can roll the bicycle wheel across the floor to illustrate that it stays

1.16 Bicycle Wheel Gyroscope upright much longer than it would if released from rest. The static and dynamic stability of bicycles makes an interesting digression [1115]. You can build a larger version of the gyroscope using a water-filled automobile tire and other inexpensive parts easily obtained from junkyards [16].

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DISCUSSION The gyroscope provides an interesting and unusual example of the conservation of angular momentum. The angular momentum is a vector pointing along the axis about which the gyroscope spins (in a sense given by the right-hand rule). In the absence of external torques, the direction as well as the magnitude of this vector will remain constant. Friction produces a torque that decreases the magnitude of the vector and eventually causes the gyroscope to stop spinning. Gravity produces a torque perpendicular to both the axis of the gyroscope and the vertical, and thus causes the horizontal precession. On a less abstract level, you can explain the precession in terms of the downward pull of gravity that tries to make the wheel rotate faster at the bottom than at the top. Since the wheel is rigid, this can happen only if the wheel moves horizontally in the direction in which the bottom of the wheel is spinning. The Earth is a large gyroscope that precesses once every 26 000 years due to the gravitational torque exerted by the Sun on the slight bulge at the equator. This precession may be at least partially responsible for the onset of the Ice Ages. Note that the frequency of precession is inversely proportional to the frequency at which the gyroscope is spinning. You can illustrate this fact by observing carefully the precession as the gyroscope slows down. Furthermore, the precession frequency is independent of the angle that the axis makes with the horizontal. The torque is greatest when the axis is horizontal, but so also is the distance it has to move to precess once around, and the effects just cancel. The kinetic energy associated with the precession has to come from somewhere. It comes from the gravitational potential energy of the gyroscope itself. When you release the gyroscope from an initial fixed horizontal position, it starts to fall in the usual manner. This falling motion rapidly transforms into precession, with the center of mass slightly lower than it was initially. As it falls, it overshoots its equilibrium position slightly and oscillates up and down about this equilibrium, resulting in nutation. The nutation usually damps out rather quickly, but you can excite it by a rapid upward or downward impulsive force on the free end of the axle of the gyroscope. Friction retards the precession, and the center of mass gradually falls until eventually the wheel hangs straight down.

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1.16 Bicycle Wheel Gyroscope

HAZARDS A spinning bicycle wheel is unwieldy and hard to control because of the unique properties of the gyroscope. You can stop the rotation by touching the wheel against something (shirt not recommended!). Be careful not the let the wheel graze your chest. Dizziness can onset very quickly on the rotating stool or platform. It can induce sickness and cause you to fall after getting off the stool. Pause for a moment to regain your equilibrium before stepping off the stool. Be careful not to catch your fingers in the spokes of the wheel. If you use a volunteer on the rotating platform, locate the platform far from any objects that could cause injury if the person falls, and stand nearby to assist if the volunteer loses his or her balance.

REFERENCES 1. H. W. Dosso and R. H. Vidal, Am. J. Phys. 30, 528 (1962). 2. J. R. Prescott, Am. J. Phys. 31, 393 (1963). 3. C. T. Leondes, Scientific American 222, 80 (Mar 1970). 4. J. S. Miller, Physics Fun and Demonstrations, Central Scientific Company: Chicago (1974). 5. G. D. Beadle, Phys. Teach. 27, 488 (1989). 6. N. R. Greene, Phys. Teach. 35, 431 (1997). 7. A. Bryant, Phys. Teach. 38, 476 (2000). 8. R. H. Johns, Phys. Teach. 36, 178 (1998). 9. R. H. Johns, Phys. Tech. 41, 516 (2003). 10. H. F. Meiners, Physics Demonstration Experiments, Vol I, The Ronald Press Company: New York (1970). 11. D. E. H. Jones, Physics Today 23, 34 (Apr 1970). 12. S. S. Wilson, Scientific American 228, 81 (Mar 1973). 13. R. G. Hunt, Phys. Teach. 27, 160 (1989). 14. J. D. Nightingale, Phys. Teach. 31, 244 (1993). 15. L. A. Bloomfield, How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life, John Wiley & Sons: New York (2001). 16. H. A. Daw, Am. J. Phys. 56, 657 (1988).