Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
The Acoustics of Stonehenge
Stonehenge has long been an astronomical wonder, but did you know it’s an aural wonder as well? A team of acoustic engineers and an archaeologist constructed and tested a 1:12 scale model of the monument as it existed around 2200 B.C. Their model included 157 3D-printed stones (which took about nine months to print!), carefully…
Filming a Calving Glacier
The San Rafael Glacier, one of the fastest calving glaciers in the world, sits above a fjord in Patagonia. About 10 – 25 meters of the glacier is lost to calving every day. Here, filmmakers take you behind-the-scenes to show what it takes to film in such a remote, unpredictable, and dangerous environment. (Image and…
Fractal Frost
As nightly temperatures drop in the northern latitudes, many of us are beginning to wake up to frosty patterns on leaves, windows, and cars. Frost‘s spread is a complex dance between evaporation and nucleation, as seen in this recent study. Here, researchers watched frost grow on a surface covered in 30-micrometer-wide micropillars. The pillars serve…
Witch’s Broom
Known by many names — including the Witch’s Broom Nebula — NGC 6960 is part of a supernova remnant visible in the constellation Cygnus. The wisp-like filaments of the nebula are shock waves moving through the cloud of dust and ionized gas. Based on observations using the Hubble Space Telescope, the nebula is expanding at…
Solid, Liquid, Both?
Materials like oobleck — a suspension of cornstarch particles in water — are tough to classify. In some circumstances, they behave like a fluid, but in others, they act like a solid. Here researchers sandwiched a thin layer of oobleck between glass plates and injected air into the mixture. For a fluid, this setup creates…
Seeking Magma
In 2009, drillers seeking geothermal energy in Iceland accidentally pierced a hidden magma chamber. After a billowing pillar of steam and glass shards poured out from the hole, it created the hottest geothermal well ever, until the casing failed. Now drillers are preparing to return to the area, this time with the intention of reaching…
Superfluid Instabilities
Superfluids — like Bose-Einstein condensates — are bizarre compared to fluids from our everyday experience because they have no viscosity. Without viscosity, it’s no surprise that they behave in unusual ways. Here, researchers simulated superfluids moving past one another. In each of these images, the blue fluid is moving to the left, and the red…
RC Ground Effect Plane
The ekranoplan was a massive, Soviet-era aircraft that relied on ground effect to stay aloft. In this video, RC pilots test out their own homemade version of the craft, including some neat flow visualization of the wingtip vortices. When an aircraft (or, for that matter, a bird) flies near the ground, it experiences less drag…
As Above, So Below
I love a good crossover between fluid dynamics and something unexpected. Fiber artist Megan Zaniewski uses thread-painting techniques to embroider ducks, frogs, otters, and other animals as they appear both above and below water. I am blown away by how she captures the movement and turbulence of water in these pieces! Just look at that…
Better Inhalers Through CFD
As levels of air pollution rise, so does the incidence of pulmonary diseases like asthma. Treatments for these diseases largely rely on inhalers containing drug particles that need to be carried into the small bronchi of the lungs. To better understand how the process works, researchers used computational fluid dynamics to simulate how air and…