2 ms·
It might just be possible. First of all, if you look at static pressure, obviously hovercraft exist and work. And tornadoes can lift cars off the ground. Even s
by adrianmonk 7y ago
It might just be possible. First of all, if you look at static pressure, obviously hovercraft exist and work. And tornadoes can lift cars off the ground. Even strong winds can.
Doing some numbers, my car appears to have a horizontal area of about 7.5 m^2 and a mass of about 1500 kg. With earth's gravity, that means 14700 N spread over 7.5 m^2, which means average pressure of 1960 Pa.
Wikipedia says (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure#Examples_of_sound_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure#Examples_of_sou...) that a shock wave happens at 101,000 Pa.
So the pressure needed to lift my car would be about 2% of the strongest pressure that can exist in a sound wave.
Presumably it's a little more complex than that because sound waves oscillate and can't exert constant pressure. So some factor has to be added for that. But seems like there's about 50X to play with before hitting the limit of shock waves.
It's going to be crazy loud, though. Like a gun going off continuously.