Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
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Fire in Microgravity
In the movie “Gravity” Sandra Bullock’s character battles a fire aboard the International Space Station. Combustion is a huge concern in space habitats. Microgravity fires are challenging to detect and fight because they behave very differently in the absence of buoyancy. On Earth, buoyancy makes hot air rise from a flame while cooler air is…
Fluids Round-up – 2 November 2013
Fluids round-up time! Here are your latest links: Over at PhysicsFocus, Colin White discusses the Bernoulli fallacy and other zombie myths of physics. (Via @JenLucPiquant) Aviation Week has an exclusive look at Skunk Works’ SR-72 next-gen hypersonic aircraft. MinutePhysics asks if it’s better to walk or run through rain. This post has another take on the question. io9 describes…
Liquid Sculptures
[original media no longer available] Water sculptures–a marriage of liquids, photography, and timing–are spectacular form of fluid dynamics as art. Artist Markus Reugels is a master of the form. This video captures the life and death of such water sculptures at 2,000 fps, beginning with the fall of the initial blue droplet. The droplet’s impact…
Cornstarch Physics
Oobleck, a non-Newtonian fluid made up of water and cornstarch, is a perennial Internet favorite for its ability to dance and the fact that one can run across a pool of it. It’s typically described as a shear-thickening fluid and only exhibits solid-like behavior under impact. Strictly speaking, oobleck is a suspension of solid grains…
How Erosion Shapes a Flow
Erosion creates all manner of strange shapes as wind and water cut away at solids. But why does the interaction of the fluid and solid result in the geometries we observe? Above is a collage from an experiment in which a soft clay sphere was immersed in a water tunnel. After 70 minutes, the sphere had…
How Fast Do Holes Grow?
Taylor and Culick predicted a constant velocity for the rim of an opening hole in a soap film of uniform thickness. Unfortunately, it is difficult to experimentally produce a soap film of uniform thickness. It is much easier to create films of uniform thickness with liquid crystals in their smectic-A phase, in which the molecules…
Floating Water Bridges
Water bridges that seem to float on air are an electrohydrodynamic phenomenon. By filling two beakers with extremely pure deionized water and applying a large voltage across them, flow is induced from one beaker to the other, as seen in the first few seconds of the video above. This flow is stable enough that the…
The Vortex Under a Falling Drop
We take for granted that drops which impact a solid surface will splash, but, in fact, drops only splash when the surrounding air pressure is high enough. When the air pressure is low enough, drops simply impact and spread, regardless of the fluid, drop height, or surface roughness. Why this is and what role the…
Marangoni Flows
Differences in surface tension cause fluid motion through the Marangoni effect. Because an area with higher surface tension pulls more strongly on nearby liquid than an area of low surface tension, fluid will flow toward areas of higher surface tension. Here surfactants, shown in white, are constantly injected onto a layer of water dyed blue.…
Mixing Flows
Turbulence is an excellent mixer. Here two fluorescent dyes are injected into a turbulent water jet. Flow is from the bottom of the image toward the top. The dyes are quickly mixed into the background fluid by momentum convection, their concentration decreasing with increased distance from the source. Large-scale structures like the eddies visible in…