In large-scale geophysical flows, rotation and density gradients often play major roles in the structures that form. Here the UCLA SPINLab demonstrates how large, essentially flat vortices–pancake vortices–form in rotating, Keep reading
Month: March 2025
Freezing Bubbles
If you find yourself some place really cold this holiday season, may I suggest stepping outside and having some fun freezing soap bubbles? The crystal growth is quite lovely, as seen Keep reading
Tears of Wine
Physicist Richard Feynman once famously ended a lecture by describing how the whole universe can be found in a glass of wine. And there is certainly plenty of fluid dynamics Keep reading
Underwater Gunfire
When a projectile is fired from a gun or other firearm, it is propelled by the expansion of high-temperature, high-pressure gases resulting from the combustion of a propellant, like gunpowder, Keep reading
Bouncing Jet
For the right flow speeds and incidence angles, a jet of Newtonian fluid can bounce off the surface of a bath of the same fluid. This is shown in the Keep reading
Stirring Faces
This video features simulation of the laminar flow around a plate plunging sinusoidally in a quiescent flow. As the plate moves up and down, it mixes the fluid around it. Keep reading
Fluorescing Shock Waves
Wind tunnel testing plays a major role in the planning of many space missions. Here a model of the Mars Sample Return Orbiter is tested at Mach 10 to determine Keep reading
Swirling Jets
In fluid dynamics, we like to classify flows as laminar–smooth and orderly–or turbulent–chaotic and seemingly random–but rarely is any given flow one or the other. Many flows start out laminar Keep reading
Saturn’s Polar Vortex
Nothing quite compares to the beauty of fluid dynamics on astronomical scales. What you see here are raw photographs of recent storms at Saturn’s north pole. The recent change in Keep reading
Supersonic Bubble Shock Waves
Supercomputing has been an enormous boon to fluid dynamics over the past few decades. Many problems, like the interaction between a supersonic shock wave and a bubble, are too complicated Keep reading