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För er som funderar på varför…
Hittade en intressant insändare i en tidning som skrivit att Speed rekordet delvis berode på fuktig luft = högre densitet = mer kraft.
Har själv upplevt detsamma men aldrig förstått hur det ligger till….
Han som skrivit brevet verkar ju ha koll!Sir
Finian Maynard and 48.70kt
Nice to see that 50kt will clearly be broken very soon. I must, however, correct the assumption (Seahorse June 2005) that a humid wind is ‘heavier’ then a dry one. The opposite is actually true – as is succinctly explained by Jack Williams of USA Today in a recent article:
Sir Isaac Newton was among the first scientists to state formally that humid air is less dense than dry air in 1717 in his book Optics. But other scientists didn’t generally understand this until later in that century. To see why humid air is less dense than dry air, we need to turn to one of the laws of nature the Italian physicist Amadeo Avogadro discovered in the early 1800s. In simple terms, he found that a fixed volume of gas, say one cubic meter, at the same temperature and pressure, would always have the same number of molecules no matter what gas is in the container.
Imagine a cubic foot of perfectly dry air. It contains about 78 per cent nitrogen molecules, which each have a molecular weight of 28 (two atoms with atomic weight 14). Another 21 per cent of the air is oxygen, with each molecule having a molecular weight of 32 (two atoms with atomic weight 16). The final one per cent is a mixture of other gases, which we won’t worry about.
Molecules are free to move in and out of our cubic foot of air. What Avogadro discovered leads us to conclude that if we added water vapor molecules to our cubic foot of air, some of the nitrogen and oxygen molecules would leave since the total number of molecules in our cubic foot of air stays the same.
The water molecules, which replace nitrogen or oxygen, have a molecular weight of 18 (one oxygen atom with atomic weight of 16, and two hydrogen atoms each with atomic weight of 1). This is lighter than both nitrogen and oxygen. In other words, replacing nitrogen and oxygen with water vapor decreases the weight of the air in the cubic foot; that is, its density decreases.
Therefore the increase in performance noted at St Marie on 10 April was more likely to be the effect of a high pressure day.
The change from 50 to 100 per cent humidity is only equivalent to a change in altitude of about 110ft. A change in air pressure from 1000mb to 1020mb is equivalent to nearly 700ft of altitude.
Either way, my windsurfing has some way to go!
Gerard Morris
London
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