Combustion is a remarkably complicated phenomenon fluid dynamically. The schlieren images above illustrate a couple of the variables that affect flame propagation. The top image shows an idealized, essentially spherical flame expanding in a quiescent hydrogen-air mixture at atmospheric pressure. The middle flame is expanding in a high-pressure environment, similar to an internal combustion engine. The lowest image shows a flame in a highly turbulent environment, which is also typical of internal combustion engines in order to promote mixing of the air and fuel. (Photo credit: C.K. Law, S. Chaudhuri, and F. Wu)
Month: June 2013
Studying Coughs
Bioaerosols–tiny airborne fluid droplets generated by coughing or sneezing–are a major concern for the spread of contagions like influenza. It may be possible, however, to mitigate some of these effects by manipulating biological fluid properties. The video above shows an experimental model of a cough, complete with the generation of bioaerosols from some fake human lung mucus. Contrast this with a cough where the model’s mucus has been treated to increase its viscoelasticity. The treated mucus generates substantially fewer droplets during a cough. The results suggest that drugs that increase viscoselasticity of biofluids may help stem the spread of disease. (Video credit: K. Argue et al.; research credit: M. D. A. Hasan et al.)
Hanging Liquids
A horizontal filament of viscous liquid hanging between two plates stretches under gravity. The photo above is a composite showing the stretching of a single thread over several time steps. The fluid forms a catenary, the same shape as a hanging chain or cable when supported only at its ends. This behavior is confined to viscous filaments of sufficient length and diameter. Short and thin filaments instead form a U-shape with a thin horizontal filament joined to two thicker vertical threads. This difference in shape occurs due to the drainage of the liquid along the filament’s length. If the viscous thread begins to fall before surface tension drains the fluid from the center toward the ends, then a catenary of essentially uniform diameter forms. If instead the liquid drains before falling, the non-uniform U-shape is observed. (Photo credit: M. Le Merrer et al.)
Reader Question: Non-Coalescing Droplets
Reader ancientavian asks:
I’ve often noticed that, when water splashes (especially as with raindrops or other forms of spray), often it appears that small droplets of water skitter off on top of the larger surface before rejoining the main body. Is this an actual phenomenon, or an optical illusion? What causes it?
That’s a great observation, and it’s a real-world example of some of the physics we’ve talked about before. When a drop hits a pool, it rebounds in a little pillar called a Worthington jet and often ejects a smaller droplet. This droplet, thanks to its lower inertia, can bounce off the surface. If we slow things way down and look closely at that drop, we’ll see that it can even sit briefly on the surface before all the air beneath it drains away and it coalesces with the pool below. But that kind of coalescence cascade typically happens in microseconds, far too fast for the human eye.
But it is possible outside the lab to find instances where this effect lasts long enough for the eye to catch. Take a look at this video. Here Destin of Smarter Every Day captures some great footage of water droplets skittering across a pool. They last long enough to be visible to the naked eye. What’s happening here is the same as the situation we described before, except that the water surface is essentially vibrating! The impacts of all the multitude of droplets create ripples that undulate the water’s surface continuously. As a result, air gets injected beneath the droplets and they skate along above the surface for longer than they would if the water were still. (Video credit: SuperSloMoVideos)
Glinting Off Waves
Sunglint on the ocean surface can sometimes reveal different patterns in wave conditions. In the satellite photo above, we see the Canary Islands with wavering silvery wakes stretching to the southwest. The predominant wind direction over the islands is from the northeast. The rocky islands act as a wind-break, redirecting the flow and shadowing the ocean in their wake from much of it. As a result, fewer waves are stirred up in the islands’ wakes, thereby changing the local surface reflection properties and making this image possible. (Photo credit: NASA Earth Observatory)
Fluids Round-up – 23 June 2013
Time for another round-up! Here are the recent fluidsy links I’ve collected:
- A new study on Mars suggests that dry ice may be forming gullies in dunes in a fashion akin to the Leidenfrost effect. Personally, I’m reminded of Death Valley’s roaming rocks.
- A recent episode of It’s Okay to Be Smart explains what wind is.
- xkcd’s What If blog explores what would happen if you row a boat on different fluids such as mercury, bromine, and liquid helium (for you superfluid aficionados).
- Those who love microfluidics may want to follow Physics in Drops for some small-scale fluid fun.
- Not explicitly fluid dynamical, but this video of a peregrine falcon chasing a downhill mountain biker has some great examples of aerodynamics and the in-flight agility of birds.
- For the Android users among you, be sure to check out Fleya, a multi-touch, real-time fluids simulator. (via Jeremy M/Flow Visualization)
(Photo credit: Fixed Point Code)
Protruding Fingers
Instability is a common feature of fluid flows and can generate a near infinite set of patterns. The video above shows the Saffman-Taylor instability, an interface instability that occurs when a fluid of lower viscosity is injected into a higher viscosity fluid. In this case, the fluids inhabit a thin space between two glass plates. The less viscous fluid displaces the more viscous one in a series of branching finger-like shapes. If the situation were reversed, with a more viscous fluid injected into a less viscous one, the interface would be stable and expand radially without any pattern formation. (Video credit: William Jewell College)
The Colors of Soap
The brilliant and beautiful colors of a bubble are directly related the the thickness of the soap film surrounding it. When light shines on the soap film, some rays are reflected from the upper surface of the film, while others are refracted through the film and reflect off its lower surface. These reflected rays have different phase shifts and their interference is what causes the colors we observe. The color patterns themselves reveal the interior flow of the soap film, in which gravity tries to thin the film and surface tension tries to distribute the film evenly. (Photo credit: R. Kelly, A. Fish, D. Schwichtenberg, N. Travers, G. Seese)
Stretching to Break
Have you ever wondered what happens inside a jet of fluid as it breaks into droplets? Such events are not commonly or readily measured. This video uses a double emulsion–in which immiscible fluids are encapsulated into a multi-layer droplet–to demonstrate interior fluid flow during the Plateau-Rayleigh instability. The innermost drops and the fluid encapsulating them have a low surface tension between them, thanks to the addition of a surfactant to the inner drops. As a result, the inner drops are easily deformed by motion in the fluid surrounding them. Flow on the left side of the jet is clearly parabolic, similar to pipe flow. Closer to the pinch-off, the inner droplets shift to vertical lines, indicating that the interior flow’s velocity is constant across the jet. After pinch-off, the inner droplets return to a spherical shape because they are no longer being deformed by fluid movement around them. The coiling of the inner drops inside the bigger one is due to the electrical charges in the surfactant used. (Video credit: L. L. A. Adams and D. A. Weitz)
Meeting the Wall
Even something as simple as a falling sphere meeting a wall is composed of beautiful fluid motion. In Figure 1 above, we see side-view images of a sphere at low Reynolds number falling toward a wall over several time. Initially an axisymmetric vortex ring is visible in the sphere’s wake; when the sphere touches the wall, secondary vortices form and the wake vortex moves down and out along the wall in an axisymmetric fashion (Figure 2, top view). At higher Reynolds numbers, like those in Figure 3, this axisymmetric spreading of the vortex ring develops an instability and ultimately breaks down. (Photo credit: T. Leweke et al.)
