Champagne owes much of its allure to its tiny bubbles. Unlike other wines, champagne undergoes a secondary fermentation in the bottle, during which the yeasts in the wine consume sugars Keep reading
Month: December 2024
Frozen Bubbles
Snowflakes aren’t the only frozen crystals to play with outside in the winter. Photographer Angela Kelly recently posted a series of frozen soap bubbles made by her and her son. Keep reading
Holiday Fluids: What is Fire?
Snowy holidays and long, dark nights are a great time to sit by the fire or enjoy some candlelight. We’ve talked before about how buoyancy affects a flame’s shape, how Keep reading
Holiday Fluids: Cocoa Convection
If you make a proper cup of hot chocolate this holiday, watch carefully and you just may catch some Rayleigh-Benard convection like the video above. (Note, video playback is 3x.) Keep reading
Holiday Fluids: German Pyramids
I broke out some of my family’s Christmas decorations for today’s video. Enjoy and be sure to come back tomorrow when our week of holiday-themed fluid dynamics continues! (Video credit: Keep reading
Holiday Fluids: Santa’s Aerodynamics
Today we have some holiday-themed fluid dynamics: visualization of flow around Santa’s sleigh! This is a flowing soap film visualization at a low speed (author Nick Moore has some other Keep reading
Holiday Fluids: Snowflakes
Just about everyone wishes for a White Christmas, but even when that happens, it’s rare to get a good look at the beauty of individual snowflakes. Alexey Kljatov’s macro photography of Keep reading
Holiday Fluids
BYU Splash Lab–those breakers of bottles, skippers of rocks, spinners of eggs, students of soap films, masters of splashes, and all-around cool fluid dynamicists–have some fluids-themed, high-speed holiday greetings. Likewike, Keep reading
Shuttle Re-Entry
Complicated shock wave patterns envelope vehicles traveling at supersonic and hypersonic speeds. A shock wave is essentially a very tiny region–only a few mean free path lengths wide–over which flow conditions, including density, pressure, velocity, and temperature, Keep reading
Huddling Penguins and Traffic Jams
Male emperor penguins have the unenviable task of incubating their eggs in temperatures as cold as -50 deg Celsius and winds of up to 200 km/h. To stay warm, the Keep reading