Spinning rough disc moving in a rarefied medium

Abstract

We study the Magnus effect: deflection of the trajectory of a spinning body moving in a gas. It is well known that in rarefied gases, the inverse Magnus effect takes place, which means that the transversal component of the force acting on the body has opposite signs in sparse and relatively dense gases. The existing works derive the inverse effect from nonelastic interaction of gas particles with the body. We propose another (complementary) mechanism of creating the transversal force owing to multiple collisions of particles in cavities of the body surface. We limit ourselves to the two-dimensional case of a rough disc moving through a zero-temperature medium on the plane, where reflections of the particles from the body are elastic and mutual interaction of the particles is neglected. We represent the force acting on the disc and the moment of this force as functionals depending on 'shape of the roughness;, and determine the set of all admissible forces. The disc trajectory is determined for several simple cases. The study is made by means of billiard theory, Monge-Kantorovich optimal mass transport and by numerical methods. This journal is © 2010 The Royal Society.