Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 ib Paper 3 18D Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
Let be the signed air speed along the straw towards the bubble. Conservation of mass in a pipe for the incompressible plug flow givesThe unsteady Bernoulli equation along the straw, whose open end is at atmospheric pressure, givesby the Young–Laplace equation. Substitution yields
Set . Since , the chain rule gives . The initial condition impliesWriting and integrating gives the implicit solutionAt disappearance and , so