Lasers are a great way to deliver a lot of energy very quickly. In this animation, you see a jet of water get struck by a pulse from a powerful X-ray laser. The energy from that laser pulse gets absorbed by the water in a matter of picoseconds – that’s trillionths of a second. All that energy in so little time makes the water vaporize explosively. It’s this vapor explosion that breaks the jet in two. As the vapor expands outward, it forces water from the jet into a thin film that forms a cone. The conical film bends back on itself until it strikes the jet and coalesces. For more, check out this video of a similar experiment that looked at laser impacts on droplets. (Image credit: C. Stan et al., from Supplementary Movie 5; via Gizmodo)
Month: June 2016
1500 Posts!
This is FYFD’s 1500th post! Can you believe it? Fifteen hundred posts is a heck of a lot of fluid dynamics. I’ve covered everything from the teeny tiniest scales to the astronomically huge, from events that happen in the blink of an eye to ones that require decades of patience. Today I encourage you to check out the archives whether by scrolling the visual archive, digging in by keyword, or by clicking here for something random.
Whether you’ve been here for 1 post or for all 1500, thank you! And special thanks, of course, to my Patreon patrons. If you’re a fan and want to help FYFD keep flowing and growing, please consider becoming a patron, too. (There’s cool perks available.) Here’s to the next 1500 posts!
P.S. Big thanks also to Randy Ewoldt and his lab for their fantastic viscoelastic FYFD timelapse. Isn’t it awesome?! (Image credits: N. Sharp – top image, Ewoldt Research Group – bottom image)
Diffraction
Wave phenomena can sometimes be a little difficult to wrap one’s head around. In this video, Mike from The Point Studios explains wave diffraction and why opening a window can help you spy on the conversation next door. Diffraction occurs when waves encounter an obstacle. If that obstacle is a slit in a wall, the slit becomes a point source, radiating waves outward spherically. The video focuses on acoustics, but diffraction matters in more than just sound – it’s key to water ripples, light and other electromagnetic waves, and, according to quantum theory, the fundamental building blocks of matter. (Video credit: The Point Studios)
