Lately, a high school teacher called Bruce Yeany has been uploading some fluid dynamics demonstrations on his YouTube channel. Here's his first demo video using various objects like vegetables and containers. He's also uploaded a follow-up demo with dolls.
There's a comment thread at the time of writing on that second video about whether or not it would be possible to lift an actual bald person using a rapid airstream.
I wasn't sure how to start, so here are my assumptions:
- the person has average body proportions
- the head of a bald person is roughly three quarters of a sphere (at the back)
- the radius of that sphere is $r_{head}$ of about $8$ cm
- the mass of the person is $m_{person}$ of about $80$ kg
- atmospheric pressure of $1013$ hPa
- airstream velocity $v_{air}$ (variable)
From the Bernoulli's principle wiki page, I'm guessing that this scenario falls under the compressible flow category, but there seem to be three different formulae to get to an answer. Moreover, I'm not sure how to calculate the pressure required to actually lift a human.
Is there a way to model this scenario to get to some kind of answer?