Turbulence is not the only way to mix fluids. Even a steady, laminar flow can be an effective mixer if geometry lends a hand. Above, two dyes, fluorescein (green) and rhodamine (red), are injected into a porous flow through packed spheres. The flow runs from bottom to top in both images. Seeing the flow in such a crowded geometry is challenging. Here researchers used spheres with an index of refraction that matches water – that helps them avoid refraction that would prevent them from looking through spheres to the flow on the other side. They also lit a narrow plane of the flow using a laser sheet to isolate it. Together, this allowed the researchers to track the mixing of the two initially separate streaks of dye as they randomly mix in the spaces between spheres. (Image and research credit: M. Kree and E. Villermaux)
Celebrating the physics of all that flows