STABILITY OF A PIVOTING FLUID-FILLED CONTAINER

摘要

This paper investigates the stability of a pivoting cylindrical container that is slowly filled with fluid. The stability of the upright and tilt angle equilibria is studied by using the Lagrange-Dirichlet theorem. The potential energy of the system is given for two regions that are delimited by an edge angle, and two spill angles. A bifurcation diagram is obtained showing the stability of the upright and tilt angle equilibria as function of both the fluid height in the container and the pivot location. In particular, it is shown that the upright angle equilibrium undergoes a pitchfork bifurcation and it is also found that two stable equilibria may coexist for some fluid heights and pivot point location.