Small turbochargers can achieve speeds well over 100,000 RPM. Have we ever deliberately spun anything faster than this? By “deliberately,” I am excluding things like a random piece of shrapnel or richocheting bullet that happens to get spun up to very high RPM; I’m thinking of engineered devices being spun in a controlled laboratory setting.
How fast do dentist’s drills spin?
How fast can something be spun? Is the limiting factor tension to keep the thing from flying apart? Would relativistic effects occur?
**Czarcasm **has the link I found beat, still, it might be of interest. The fastest rotation rate in the table within this link is 37.98 million RPM. It’s one of J.W. Beams’s magnetically levitated centrifuges in vacuum. A discussion of his research into ultracentrifuges starts at page 11 of the previous link. Oh, and he did this back in the 1930s and 40s.
Imagine spinning something at 60 billion rpm!
Yeah, but that’s only 1,000,000 rps.
So, assuming a circular flake, a point on the edge of those 1µm-wide graphene flakes will be travelling pi million micrometres per second.
That is only about 0.003km per second, or about 7mph, if I haven’t dropped a zero along the way.
Forgive me if I’m not too overwhelmed. My bicycle wheel spins three times faster than that every morning.
I think a more pertinent question would be: What’s the fastest rotation rate when measured in terms of the speed of the rim of whatever’s being spun?
Per Guinness, the fastest rotation speed, measured at the tip of the rotor, was in an experimental flywheel at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, on December 9, 1985. It reached 1405 m/s before disintegrating.
I don’t know of any centrifuges with a higher tip speed.
Back around 1960 when high speed dental drills first appeared, they spun around 20,000 RPM. I don’t know if there is any good reason to go faster. The dentist has to keep control. However, it was a revolution over the old mechanical ones.
Dentist drills spin at over 1,000,000 RPM now.
My dentist said he doesn’t like them - they cut too fast, and a tiny slip of the hand can turn into a big mistake (ouch!).
That’s a good spin to put on it.
That might depend on what you count as a “thing being spun”. Does a plane flying in a circle count? How about something in orbit?
Large synchrotrons like LHC and RHIC typically accelerate their particle beams to > 99% the speed of light.
Oh, I should also ask if we’re restricting to man-made things, and also just what counts as a “thing”. The surfaces of neutron stars are moving at relativistic speeds, and in so far as a rotational speed can be defined for the surface of a rotating black hole, it’s c or very close to it.
yeah but that’s not really spinning. sure it’s in a loop but i imagine he means a structure that’s connected to its axis of rotation
Yeah, I thought so too, but I figured if people were going to mention satellites and the like I may as well toss that out there. 
edit: and it is controlled after all - to an extent that’s hard to appreciate until you start to really look at the scales and time factors being dealt with.
Related question: what’s the fastest a human has ever pirouetted (ie, spun about his or her own axis, as opposed to spinning around a chamber in one of those G test thingies)?
Per this video, 308 RPM on ice skates. They claim Guinness noted it, but I haven’t confirmed that.
If we mean ballet pirouettes, then Sophia Lucia completed 55 consecutive pirouettes in March 2013. No info on how fast she was spinning, but I’m sure it was slower than the ice skater…
How fast would a diamond have to be spun for it to break apart?
Depends on its size and its shape, and on what standard you’re using to measure “how fast”.