Question

A salad spinner is used to dry lettuce that has been recently washed. (If you are unfamiliar with salad spinners and how they operate, check out this video.) For the salad spinners to operate properly, the lettuce should be evenly distributed in the basket of the salad spinner. Otherwise, after you spin the basket and remove your hand, the salad spinner will wobble and slip on the kitchen counter. You’re curious how unbalanced your salad spinner can be before it starts to slip on the counter. You measure the dimensions of your salad spinner and determine that the basket has a diameter of 29.1 cm and a height of 19.0 cm You place the salad spinner on a kitchen scale and determine that the mass of the salad spinner is 412 g The bottom of the salad spinner is rubberized. Consulting friction coefficient tables, you estimate that the coefficient of friction between the bottom of the salad spinner and your kitchen counter is 0.71 . You search online for information about the rotational speed of your spinner. You come across a journal article about students at Rice University who modified a salad spinner to create an inexpensive medical centrifuge to diagnose anemia in remote or low-resource areas. The article states that the maximum rotational speed of their salad spinner is 600 rpm. Your salad spinner is similar to the one featured in the article. Suppose you place some lettuce into one side of the basket, pump the salad spinner until the basket is spinning at top speed and then remove your hand. What is the maximum amount of lettuce that can be in the basket such that the salad spinner does not slip when you remove your hand?

Answer 1