In flight, airplane wings produce dramatic wingtip vortices. These vortices reduce the amount of lift a 3D wing produces relative to a 2D one. How much they influence the lift Keep reading
Month: March 2020
HIFiRE
Earlier this month, an international team launched a successful hypersonic flight test in Australia. The Hypersonic International Research Experimentation (HIFiRE) Flight 5b was launched atop a two-stage rocket and reached Keep reading
Skating on Vapor
Turn the stove up high enough and you may have noticed that drops of water stop boiling away and instead skate across the surface. This is the Leidenfrost effect, which Keep reading
Why Does This Kite Look So Real?
A recent viral video features mesmerizing footage of a giant octopus kite flown at a kite festival in Singapore earlier this month. The kite’s arms twist and wave lazily in Keep reading
The Reverse Magnus Effect
A good soccer player can kick the ball from the corner of the field into the goal thanks to the Magnus effect. But if you’ve ever tried to play soccer Keep reading
How Fluid Dynamics Saved the Space Shuttle
New FYFD video! In which Dianna Cowern (Physics Girl) joins me to explore boundary layer transition and how a couple of small bits of roughness could be a huge problem Keep reading
Climbing Up the Walls
You may have noticed when baking that fluids don’t always behave as expected when you agitate them. If you put a spinning rod into a fluid, we’d expect the rod Keep reading
Bursting Into Droplets
Our atmosphere is full of aerosols – extremely tiny particles and droplets of salt, dust, pollutants, and other substances. Wind’s effects alone cannot account for the sizes and quantities of Keep reading
Whiskey Stains
Photographer Ernie Button discovered that whiskey left behind intriguing patterns after it evaporated. Unlike coffee rings, the whiskey leaves behind a more uniform residue. Curious, he contacted researchers at Princeton, Keep reading
Vortex Ring Roll-Up
Vortex rings are endlessly fascinating, and they appear throughout nature from dolphins to volcanoes and from splashes to falling drops. One way to form them is to inject a jet Keep reading