Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
DIY Superwalking Droplets
Over the past few years, we’ve seen lots of research in walking droplets, especially as hydrodynamic quantum analogs. But did you know you can replicate this set-up at home and play with it yourself? This video gives an overview of the equipment you’ll need and a simple procedure to follow to get it up and…
Ascending Through Bubbles
Photographer Lucie Pollet caught this image of her freediving friend ascending through a plume of bubbles and sunlight. I love the otherworldliness of the image, like the diver is an astronaut in the dark of space. The illumination of the bubbles is spectacular, too, and reminds me of the way penguins use supercavitation to help…
Fluid Flow For Digestive Health
During digestion, our intestines use two different patterns of muscle contraction to move food through our bodies. Scientists have long wondered why we have this added complexity. Using numerical simulations of the fluid flow created by these contractions, researchers have uncovered the answer. Our intestines use peristalsis, a forward-with-occasional-backward flow pattern, as the main driver.…
“Reconfiguring It Out”
Leaves flutter and bend in the breeze, changing their shape in response to the flow. Here, researchers investigate this behavior using flexible disks pulled through water. The more flexible the disk and the faster the flow, the more cup-like the disk’s final shape. Adding tracer particles to the water allows them to visualize the flow…
Mixing Effectively
Mixing two fluids is a tougher task than you might think. One of my favorite asides from a fluids lecture concerned how to mix fruit into yogurt in an industrial setting. Mix too quickly, and you’ll obliterate the yogurt’s consistency, but mix too little and you may as well sell it as fruit-on-the-bottom. Apparently that…
Cleaning the Skies
Those of us who live in urban environments have experienced the clear, pollution-free air that comes after a rainstorm. But how exactly does rain clean the air? Air pollution typically has both gaseous and particulate components to it. As a raindrop falls, it experiences collision after collision with those particles. Depending on the particle’s surface…
Beautiful Waves
Australian photographer Ray Collins captures some of the most impressively dynamic photographs of ocean waves I’ve ever seen. The textures of the water range from glassy smooth to scaled to violent sprays of droplets. You can easily get lost in every image. For more, check out his website and Instagram. (Image credits: R. Collins; via…
Sound Makes Stickier Bandages
Keeping wounds safe and clean is hard when bandages are so prone to coming off. A team of researchers may have found a solution, though, using ultrasound to enhance adhesion. For their technique, they applied a layer of adhesive primer to the skin and covered it with a hydrogel bandage. Then they used an ultrasound…
Flow Between Fibers
Two vertical fibers, with a gap left between them, form a playground for flow in this Gallery of Fluid Motion video. If the fiber spacing is small enough, the flow will form a stable liquid sheet that runs the full length of the fibers. With a little more distance, though, the fluid forms intermittent bridges,…
Escaping the Sun
One enduring mystery of the solar wind — a stream of high-energy particles expelled from the sun — is how the particles get accelerated in the first place. The sun frequently belches out spurts of plasma, but without further momentum, that material simply falls back to the sun’s surface under the star’s gravity. Mechanisms like…