The physics of falling chimney stacks

Abstract

The toppling motion of falling chimney stacks has been the subject of a number of studies which address the interesting phenomenon that brick chimneys usually break well before they hit the ground. Modern concrete chimneys, and wind generator towers, however, are strong enough to topple without breaking and many videos of their destruction are available on the web. Their angular motion can be investigated with ‘Tracker’, and then analysed in terms of the conservation of energy, of the applied torque, and of the angle as a function of time, all of which show good agreement with the video data.