Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Withstanding Windstorms
Saguaro cacti can grow 15 meters tall, and despite their shallow root systems can withstand storm winds up to 38 meters per second without being blown over. Grooves in the cacti’s surface may contribute to its resilience, by adding structural support and/or through reducing aerodynamic loads. The latter theory mirrors the concept of dimples on…
Water Walking, Exploding Droplets, and Colliding Vortices
Every year I look forward to the APS DFD conference in November. It brings thousands of researchers together to share the latest in fluid dynamics. So much goes on in those three days that it’s impossible to capture, but last year I teamed up with Tom Crawford and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics to attempt just…
An Armored Bed
A river’s flow constantly changes its underlying bed. The rocks and particulates beneath a flowing river can typically be divided into two zones: an upper layer called the bed-load zone where the flow moves particles with it and a lower layer where particles are mostly trapped but may creep over long periods. In gravelly river-beds…
Juno’s Citizen Science
The Juno mission’s JunoCam has been producing stunning photos each time the spacecraft swoops past Jupiter. The instrument has a planning team, but its primary use is for citizen scientists, who have been suggesting images to take each orbit and have been processing those images. Most of the photos we see are like the one…
The Foggy Grand Canyon
On occasion in the late fall and early winter, the Grand Canyon can fill with clouds of fog. This occurs when a layer of warm air traps cold, moist air inside the canyon, creating what’s known as a temperature inversion. The trapped air’s moisture condenses into fog, creating the appearance of a cloud sea lapping…
The Lava Lamps That Secure the Internet
A wall of lava lamps in a San Francisco office currently helps keep about 10% of the Internet’s traffic secure. Internet security company Cloudflare uses a video feed of the lava lamps as one of the inputs to the algorithms they use to generate large random numbers for encryption. The concept dates back to a…
Water Atop Oil
At first glance, this image looks much like the impact of any drop on a pool of the same liquid, but that’s not what you’re seeing. This is the impact of a water droplet on a thin film of oil, and the immiscibility of those two fluids has important effects on the collision. When the…
Jumping Droplets
Condensation, which removes heat by changing a vapor into a liquid, is a common feature in industrial heat transfer. When droplets form on surfaces, they typically have to grow to millimeter size before gravity causes them to slide off and open up the surface to new droplet formation. Hydrophobic surfaces can shed droplets a little…
Seeing the Wake
Hot exhaust gases churn in the wake of this climbing B-1B Lancer. The high temperature of the exhaust changes the density and, thus, the refractive index of the gases relative to the atmosphere. Light traveling through the exhaust gets distorted, making the highly turbulent flow visible to the human eye. Note how the four individual…
Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics: Resources
This is the final post in a collaborative series with FYP on pilot-wave hydrodynamics. Previous posts: 1) Introduction; 2) Chladni patterns; 3) Faraday instability; 4) Walking droplets; 5) Droplet lattices; 6) Quantum double-slit experiments; 7) Hydro single- and double-slit experiments; 8) Quantum tunneling; 9) Hydrodynamic tunneling; 10) de Broglie’s pilot-wave theory Thanks for joining us this…