Research

The Fluid Dynamical Sewing Machine

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If you’ve drizzled viscous liquids like honey or syrup, you’ve no doubt witnessed their ability to coil. Combine that coiling with a moving platform and you form a system known as the fluid dynamical sewing machine, which creates different consistent patterns of loops and curves depending on the speed at which the liquid falls and the velocity of the moving platform. The predictability of these patterns makes them especially useful for 3D printing. Previously a group at MIT developed a glass printer that could use the instability, and here a group from Montreal demonstrates how they can build solid coils at various scales. Their video also explores what the structural properties of such coils are after they solidify. (Image, video, and research credit: R. Passieux et al.)

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