Most everyone is familiar with the difficulty of getting ketchup out of its bottle. Part of the trouble is that ketchup is a shear-thinning fluid, meaning that its viscosity decreases Keep reading
Month: September 2024
Rocket Engine Test
[original media no longer available] In this static test of XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx rocket engine, Mach diamonds (shown at the top of the frame) are visible in the rocket exhaust. Keep reading
Floral Still Life
Fluid motion is captured as a floral still life in these high-speed photos by Jack Long. The artist keeps mum about his set-up but notes that these are single capture Keep reading
Hydrophobic Water Entry
Many factors can affect the size and shape of the splash when an object impacts water and wettability–the ability of a liquid to maintain contact with a solid–is one of Keep reading
Simulated Turbulence
This image, taken from a direct numerical simulation, shows turbulence in a stably stratified flow in which lighter fluid sits atop a denser fluid. In the image lighter colors represent Keep reading
Viscous Fingers
When less viscous fluids are injected into a more viscous medium, the low-viscosity fluid forms finger-like protrusions into the background fluid. This is known as the Saffman-Taylor instability. The video Keep reading
Microgravity Cornstarch
We’ve seen the effects of vibration on shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluids here on Earth before in the form of “oobleck fingers” and “cornstarch monsters”, but, to my knowledge, this is the Keep reading
Jet Collisions
When two jets of liquid collide, they form a sheet of fluid. As the speeds of the jets change, the sheet can become unstable, forming a set of liquid ligaments Keep reading
Soap Bubbles Bursting
To the human eye, the burst of a soap bubble appears complete and instantaneous, but high-speed video reveals the directionality of the process. Surface tension is responsible for the spherical Keep reading
Stalling a Wing
At small angles of attack, air flows smoothly around an airfoil, providing lifting force through the difference in pressure across the top and bottom of the airfoil. As the angle Keep reading