Vortices appear in scales both large and small, from your shower and the flap of an insect’s wing to cyclones and massive storms on other planets. Especially with these large-scale vortices, it can be difficult to understand the factors that affect their trajectories and intensities over time. Here researchers have studied the vortices produced on a heated half bubble for clues as to their long-term behavior. Heating the base of the bubble creates large thermal plumes which rise and generate large vortices, like the one seen above, on the bubble’s surface. Researchers observed the behavior of the vortices with and without rotation of the bubble. They found that rotating bubbles favored vortices near the polar latitudes of the bubble, just as planets like the Earth and Saturn have long-lived polar vortices. They also found that the intensification of both bubble vortices and hurricanes was reasonably captured by a single time constant, which may lead to better predictions of storm behaviors. Their latest paper is freely available here. (Image credit: H. Kellay et al.; research credit: T. Meuel et al.; via io9)
Month: January 2014
Hydraulic Jump in the Lab
When fast-moving liquids encounter regions of slow-moving liquids, they decelerate rapidly, trading their kinetic energy for potential energy and creating a hydraulic jump. Flow in the video above is from left to right. The depth difference between the incoming and outgoing water can be directly related to the velocity of the incoming fluid. Hydraulic jumps in rivers and spillways are often extremely turbulent, like the one in this video, but laminar examples exist as well. In fact, with the right height and flow rate, you can create stable hydraulic jumps right in your kitchen sink. The hydraulic jumps formed from a falling jet are typically circular, but with the right conditions, all sorts of wild shapes can be observed. (Video credit: H. Chanson)
Vibrations from Vortices
Vortex shedding frequently happens in the wakes of non-streamlined bodies as a result of flow around the obstacle. Newton’s third law states that forces come in equal and opposite pairs, meaning that the vortex shedding behind an obstacle is accompanied by a force on the obstacle. For a fixed cylinder, this is not always apparent, but for a pendulum, like the ones demonstrated in this video, this vortex-induced vibration causes significant motion. This same effect can make traffic lights and industrial chimneys sway. You’ve likely experienced it yourself as well, if while swimming you’ve ever spread your fingers underwater and spun in place. Try it sometime with your arm out and you’ll feel the vortices make your arm vibrate up and down as you spin. (Video credit: Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations)
Snow Rollers
Snow rollers are nature’s snowballs, formed when high winds roll a chunk of snow along the surface, allowing it to accumulate more and more material. They occur relatively rarely because their appearance is the culmination of several specific meteorological factors. To form rollers, the ground needs to be icy, with a layer of loose, wet snow above the ice. And, of course, it needs to be windy enough to move the snow without being so windy that snow breaks up. In the photos above, the snow roller got too large for the wind to continue moving it, but the wind didn’t stop blowing. Instead, the snow roller became an obstacle to the flow and a horseshoe vortex formed at its base. The spinning of the vortex dug out the trench in front of and along the sides of the snow roller. This same effect is often seen on the windward side of trees in winter. (Photo credit and submission: S. Benton)
Controlling Supersonic Flight
The forces on an object in flight come from the distribution of pressure on the surface. To alter an object’s trajectory, one has to shift the pressure distribution. On subsonic and transonic aircraft, this is usually done with control surfaces like an aileron, but at supersonic speeds this can require a lot of force. The schlieren images above show an alternative approach in which a plasma actuator near the nosetip generates asymmetric forces on the cone. The actuator discharges plasma at t=0, and flow is from left to right. In the first image, the bubble of plasma is expanding on the upper side of the cone, disrupting the nearby shock wave. Over time, it moves downstream, carrying its disruption with it. The asymmetric effect of the plasma causes uneven pressures on either side of the cone that can be triggered in order to turn it in flight. (Photo credit: P. Gnemmi and C. Rey)
Inksplosion
Chemical Bouillon are a trio of artists who use the chemistry of surface reactions to create abstract videos full of exploding and imploding droplets and colors. As chemicals react, local concentrations at the interface vary, which changes the local surface tension. These gradients drive flow from areas of low surface tension to those of higher surface tension. This is called the Marangoni effect – the same behavior that drives tears in a glass of wine. Chemical Bouillon have a whole YouTube channel dedicated to these kinds of videos, with everything from inks to ferrofluids. Be sure to take a look at some of their other videos and, if you like them, subscribe. (Video credit: Chemical Bouillon)
Measuring Wind Turbines with Snowfall
One of the challenges in large-scale wind energy is that operating wind turbines do not behave exactly as predicted by simulation or wind tunnel experiments. To determine where our models and small-scale experiments are lacking, it’s useful to make measurements using a full-scale working turbine, but making quantitative measurements in such a large-scale, uncontrolled environment is very difficult. Here researchers have used natural snowfall as seeding particles for flow visualization. The regular gaps in the flow are vortices shed from the tip of the passing turbine blades. With a searchlight illuminating a 36 m x 36 m slice of the flow behind a wind turbine, the engineers performed particle image velocimetry, obtaining velocity measurements in that region that could then be correlated to the wind turbine’s power output. Such in situ measurements will help researchers improve wind turbine performance. (Video credit: J. Hong et al.)
Tidal Bore
The daily ebb and flood of the tides results from the competing forces of the Earth’s rotation and the sun and moon’s gravitational pull on the oceans. In a few areas, the local topography funnels the incoming water into a tidal bore with a distinctive leading edge. The photo above comes from the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet in Alaska, where bore tides can reach a height of 7 ft and move as quickly as 15 mph. For surfers, the bore can provide a long ride–40 minutes in this case–but they can be extremely dangerous as well. Bore tides are associated with intense turbulence capable of ripping out moorings and structures; the waves are often accompanied by a roar caused by air entrainment, impact on obstacles, and the erosion of underlying sediment. (Photo credit: S. Dickerson/Red Bull Illume; via Jennifer Ouellette)
Air Pressure Affects Splashes
When a drop falls on a dry surface, our intuition tells us it will splash, breaking up into many smaller droplets. Yet this is not always the case. The splashing of a droplet depends on many factors, including surface roughness, viscosity, drop size, and–strangely enough–air pressure. It turns out there is a threshold air pressure below which splashing is suppressed. Instead, a drop will spread and flatten without breaking up, as shown in the video above. For contrast, here is the same fluid splashing at atmospheric pressure. This splash suppression at low pressures is observed for both low and high viscosity fluids. Although the mechanism by which gases affect splashing is still under investigation, measurements show that no significant air layer exists under the spreading droplet except near the very edges. This suggests that the splash mechanism depends on how the spreading liquid encroaches on the surrounding gas. (Video credit: S. Nagel et al.; research credit: M. Driscoll et al.)
Hydrodynamic Quantum Analogs
Over the past few years, researchers have been exploring the dynamics of droplets bouncing on a vibrating fluid. These systems display many behaviors associated with quantum mechanics, including wave-particle duality, single-slit and double-slit diffraction, and tunneling. A new paper examines the system mathematically, showing that the droplets obey many of the same mathematics as quantum systems. In fact, the droplet-wave system behaves as a macroscopic analog of 2D quantum behaviors. The implications are intriguing, especially for teaching. Now students of quantum mechanics can experiment with a simple apparatus to understand some of the non-intuitive aspects of quantum behavior. For more, see the paper on arxiv. (Image credit: D. Harris and J. Bush; research credit: R. Brady and R. Anderson)
