As I was scrolling through Instagram one day, I came across this video of a clamp falling.
Many people in the comment section were asking “How far did it fall?” And naturally, I felt inclined to find out myself.
I originally decided to neglect air resistance as a factor as I thought that the clamp was heavy and had a low reference area,
but I saw others claiming in the comment section that such an assumption was invalid. I decided to figure it out for myself.
Using Fusion 360, I cadded a similar clamp and opened it the same way in the video. I then ran a CFD analysis using Ansys CFX
at several different speeds and recorded the force exerted. I then plotted this on a chart (Force vs Velocity^2) and did a
linear curve fit to get the drag coefficient. Using this information, and the reference area from Fusion 360, I was now able to
calculate the drag force at any speed. I set up a nonlinear differential equation and solved it using Euler’s method in Excel.
Combining this with the 5 seconds of fall that I got from analyzing the video, we can get a final fall height of 107.21 meters.
I also was curious to find out what the clamp would look like when it hit the ground, so I simulated it in Fusion360 again.