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, Keep reading
Month: December 2019
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 Keep reading
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 Keep reading
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 Keep reading
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 Keep reading
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 Keep reading
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 Keep reading
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 Keep reading
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 Keep reading
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, Keep reading