[Physics] How to fast moving particles gain energy from slow moving ones

fluid dynamicsmolecular dynamicspressurestatistical mechanics

Imagine a large diameter piston filled with water connected to a small funnel. When you press on the piston slowly but with considerable force the water will move very quickly from the funnel in form of a jet. But how is it possible on a molecular level?

Water molecules are constantly moving about in the piston with various speeds and directions bumping into each other and exchanging momentum like billiard balls, however water molecules from the funnel are moving uniformly at great speed.

I want to know how it is possible for slow molecules to be adding momentum to the ones that are already moving faster than the average. In billiard ball analogy slow moving ball moving in the same direction would never catch up with the faster one to further increase its momentum and if it was moving in the opposite direction then it could only receive momentum from the faster one and therefore only slow it down.

Now I imagine that this question probably sounds silly but I can't find any answer after searching for it, so I decided to ask here.

Best Answer

The question isn't silly. The speed of each molecule in the liquid is much higher than the speed of either the piston or the water shooting out from the nozzle. At room temperature, for water molecules the average is on the order of 500m/s. And yet, the speed of sound in water is three times higher than that, which implies that pressure can propagate in water at that speed. If you tried to make a jet of water molecules faster than the speed of sound, then you would run into difficulties with the nozzle method, though. You would get a shock front, strong heating, possibly ionization... all loss mechanisms that would restrict the velocity that you are really after. The better way would be to make a piston that shoots out a cylinder/piston that shoots out water. That's a two stage rocket... to squirt water.

Picking up on Aaron's comment: he is absolutely correct that one can find nozzle shapes which convert a hot, high pressure gas into a clean supersonic flow. That is the major requirement to building efficient rocket engines. The engine nozzle in that case is a thermodynamic machine which converts the internal thermal energy of the gas into a directed flow that is many times faster than the speed of sound in the gas.

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