Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Using Electric Fields to Avoid Dripping
Anyone who’s painted a room at home is familiar with the frustration of drips. At certain inclinations, practically every viscous liquid develops these gravity-driven instabilities. They’re troublesome in manufacturing as well, where viscous films are often used to coat components and unexpected drips can ruin the process. To avoid this, researchers are adding electric fields…
Ice Patterns
Periods of freezing and thawing can leave complicated patterns in ice, as seen in this aerial photo of Binnewater Lake in New York. Ice rarely forms evenly on large bodies like this, so there are always underlying weaknesses. A hard freeze may have caused the ice to contract, forming the initial radial pattern. Then warmer…
Inferring Flows with Neural Networks
Fluid dynamicists have long used flow visualization methods to get a qualitative sense for flows, but it’s rare to derive much quantitative data from this imagery. But that may soon change thanks to a new computational technique, called Hidden Fluid Mechanics, that uses data from flow visualizations combined with physics-informed neural networks to derive the…
Boiling Water Using Ice Water
Steve Mould demonstrates a neat thermodynamic trick in this video by using ice water to boil hot water. The key to understanding this is recognizing that the boiling point of water depends both on its temperature and its pressure. Here’s the set-up (which, to be clear, neither he nor I recommend you try yourself): microwave…
Gliding Birds Get Extra Lift From Their Tails
Gorgeous new research highlights some of the differences between fixed-wing flight and birds. Researchers trained a barn owl, tawny owl, and goshawk to glide through a cloud of helium-filled bubbles illuminated by a light sheet. By tracking bubbles’ movement after the birds’ passage, researchers could reconstruct the wake of these flyers. As you can see…
Collapsing Inside a Soap Film
There’s a common demonstration of surface tension where a loop of string is placed in a soap film and then the film inside the loop is popped, making it suddenly form a perfect circle when the outer soap film’s surface tension pulls the string equally from every direction. In this video, researchers study a similar…
Happy Valentine’s Day!
To make this heart, photographer Helene Caillaud flung paint off a tool attached to a drill bit, much like Fabian Oefner did in his “Black Hole” series. Caillaud, however, tweaked the set-up to create distinctive shapes at the center of her images, with centrifugal force creating the beautiful filaments spiraling outward. It’s a neat effect…
Watery Suction Enables Spiderman-Like Climbing
Spiderman makes it look easy, but sticking to surfaces with enough force to climb them is a challenge at the human scale. These researchers tackled the problem with a new method of suction. Traditional suction devices are limited by their ability to seal at the edges. Any surface roughness that prevents a perfect seal creates…
Using Flow Separation to Fly
Fixed-wing flight typically favors the efficiency of long skinny wings, which is why so many aircraft have them. But for smaller flyers, like micro air vehicles (MAVs), short and stubby wings are necessary to stand up the disruption of sudden wind gusts. But a new MAV design eschews that conventional wisdom in favor of a…
In Search of a Better Espresso
Of specialty coffee drinks, espresso has the most cup-to-cup variation in quality. For those who are not coffee aficionados — such as yours truly — espresso is made by forcing hot water through a packed bed of coffee grains. Many factors can affect the final output, including the amount of dry coffee used, the fineness…