Earth's Core Made In Miniature

ananyo writes "A 3-meter-tall metal sphere full of molten sodium is about to start work modeling the Earth's core. The gigantic dynamo, which has taken researchers ten years to build, 'will generate a self-sustaining electromagnetic field that can be poked, prodded and coaxed for clues about Earth's dynamo, which is generated by the movement of liquid iron in the outer core.'"

Re:Woohoo!

[durrr]

Next step is to drop the content of the sphere into a lake surrounded by high speed 4k cameras with hardened storage units.

How they know...

[gr8_phk]

The gigantic dynamo, which has taken researchers ten years to build, 'will generate a self-sustaining electromagnetic field that can be poked, prodded and coaxed for clues about Earth's dynamo, which is generated by the movement of liquid iron in the outer core.'

They probably know this physical model will exhibit a magnetic field because they did a FEA and CFD simulations of the thing. So why then did it have to be built?

How can this produce accurate results?

[wisebabo]

How can this produce accurate results that will possibly match that of reality? This device (unless they are planning to put it on the space station) will be overwhelmingly influenced by the (real) earth's gravity. Convection will obviously be way off.

So, unless they are trying to model how the earth's core would act if it were enclosed in a giant metal sphere and placed on a gigantic table subject to one-gee, won't this simulation be way off?

Even if they put it in space, I'm not sure the simulation would be correct, the forces provided from the self-gravitation would probably be off.

Good example of the use of physical models...

[Zrako]

in relationship to yesterdays article on physical models in the age of computers (http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/12/06/1736231/physical-models-in-an-age-of-computers). This is a great example of when a physical model is invaluable to scientific research even though a computer model could have been used. What happens in theory doesn't always hold true in practice.