Experimental study of Bernoulli’s equation with losses

The purpose of this work is to present a simple and inexpensive experiment to study the drainage of a cylindrical vessel. The experimental set up consists of a transparent cylinder and a web cam or a digital camera connected to a computer. The model proposed to explain the results makes use of Bernoulli’s equation for real flows that includes energy losses. The experiment allows us to test thoroughly the implication of the model and to extract the relevant parameter associated with the energy losses. The experimental results can be nicely explained by the model, which is a generalization of Torricelli’s expression, and clearly illustrate the utility of the extended Bernoulli equation for real fluids.