Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon

Re:Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon by khafra on Thursday February 17, 2011 @08:17AM (#2230779)

Surely there are some regular motions which could be approximated using a spoon which would more efficiently move the hottest parts of a liquid to the surface than random turbulence? My intuition says sliding the spoon down the side of the mug, then turning the flat side upward and lifting it in the middle of the mug would be one such more efficient motion.

Does anybody have a supercomputing cluster we could use to run an optimizing search across a whole bunch of fluid flow simulations?

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Re:Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon by pbhjpbhj on Thursday February 17, 2011 @12:24PM (#2231785)

>My intuition says sliding the spoon down the side of the mug, then turning the flat side upward and lifting it in the middle of the mug would be one such more efficient motion.

You're still going to be getting laminar flow unless you're lifting fast enough to eject the tea from the cup (which I assume is contrary to the rules). I use a forward and backward motion going from low down at one side to high up at the other (especially when stirring hot soup for my little nearly 2yo) - I'm trying to produce a ragged (turbulent) collapsing void of air, maximising the surface area exposed particularly in producing as much turbulence as possible at the surface. One tends to get spiralling voids at either edge of the spoon.

I wonder if you can stir fast enough to produce cavitation and what effect that would have on the results.

Also can I design my own spoon to use?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation

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Re:Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon by apl on Thursday February 17, 2011 @08:53AM (#2230870)

I got one, but unfortunately it's still working on the milk-or-tea-first conundrum.

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Re:Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon by JonnieCache on Thursday February 17, 2011 @09:13AM (#2230945)

>milk-or-tea-first

Ahhhhh, the one debate more divisive than emacs-or-vim.

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