An entertainment company is considering building an underwater amusement park, in which the visitors would stay in a submerged, transparent, rotating, spherical observation room, suspended from a floating platform through a non-rotating, cylindrical elevator shaft, as shown in the figure. The room has a diameter of 10 m and rotates, about a vertical axis at the rate of 1 rev/min. The shaft has a diameter of 1.5 m and a length of 30 m. Determine the magnitude and direction of the total horizontal force on the room/shaft structure by an ocean current flowing with a speed of 0.3 m/s.

Contributed by Stavros Tavoularis, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.