FYFD

Category: Art

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    Freezing Soap Bubbles

    I’m not a winter person, but there’s something almost magical about the way water freezes. From instant snow to snow rollers and weird ice formations to slushy waves, winter brings all kinds of bizarre and unexpected sights. The video above is an artistic look at one of my favorites – freezing soap bubbles. Normally, the thin film of a soap bubble is in wild motion, convecting due to gravity, surface tension differences, and the surrounding air. Such a thin layer of liquid loses its heat quickly, though, and, as ice crystals form, the bubble’s convection and rotation slow dramatically, often breaking the thin membrane. Happily photographer Paweł Załuska had the patience to capture the beautiful ones that didn’t break!  (Video credit: P. Załuska; via Gizmodo)

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  • Falling Ink

    Falling Ink

    Photographer Linden Gledhill created these nebula-like composites from photos of ink diffusing in water. The work was inspired by Mark Stock’s “Spherical Rayleigh-Taylor Instabilities” series featured here last week. Like Stock’s computational art, the twisted fingers and vortex rings above form due to the denser ink falling through less dense water. The interface between the two fluids distorts under the effects of gravity and the fluids’ relative motion. Such shapes are ephemeral at best; the falling ink will quickly become turbulent and diffuse throughout the water.  (Photo credit and submission: L. Gledhill)

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    “Monsoon II”

    Every child learns about the water cycle in school, but an academic description of the process often lacks nature’s grandeur. In “Monsoon II” photographer Mike Olbinski captures the majesty of cloud formation and rainfall in a way that rekindles awe for the scale of the process. It begins with bright clouds popping up, the result of warm moist air rising from the ground and cooling at altitude. As more water vapor evaporates, rises, and condenses, water droplets collide in these clouds, coalescing and growing until they grow too large and heavy to stay aloft. These are the droplets that fall in sheets of rain, blurring the air beneath them. There’s an incredible beauty to watching rain fall from a distance; it looks calm and localized in a way that’s utterly at odds with the experience from inside the storm. (Video credit: M. Olbinski; submitted by jshoer)

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    Oil Film on Water

    This award-winning short film features a thin layer of volatile oil on water. The oil evaporates quickest from shallow pools only microns deep, which appear bluish in the video. Surface instabilities along the edge of the pool create flow that draws oil in, generating the iridescent droplets seen floating among the evaporation pools. The droplets combine and coalesce as they come in contact with one another. Since droplets have a larger volume per surface area than the shallow pools, they evaporate more slowly. The behaviors observed here are important to applications like oil and fuel spills, which can persist longer if the floating fluid layer tends to form droplets. (Video credit: J. Hart; via txchnologist)

  • Viscous Fingers

    Viscous Fingers

    Take a viscous fluid, like laundry detergent, and sandwich it between two plates of glass. Fluid dynamicists call this set-up a Hele-Shaw cell. If you then inject a less viscous fluid, like air, between the plates–or if you try to pry them apart–you’ll see a distinctive pattern of dendritic fingers form. This viscous fingering, also known as the Saffman-Taylor instability, occurs because the interface between the two fluids is unstable. Invert the problem, though–inject a more viscous fluid into a less viscous one–and no special shapes will form because the interface will remain stable. (Image credit: Random Walk Studios, source)

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    Bullet-Time Inferno

    Remember the bullet time effect from The Matrix? This spectacular video gives you a similar effect with the turbulent flames created by firebreathers. To capture this level of detail, Mitch Martinez uses an array of 50 cameras placed around the performers, allowing him to reconstruct the full, three-dimensional representation of the flames. Similarly, some scientists use arrays of high-speed video cameras to collect 3D, time-resolved data about phenomena like combustion. Because these flows are so complex in terms of their fluid dynamics and chemistry, capturing full 3D data is important to help understand and model the flow better. (Video credit: M. Martinez; via Rakesh R.)

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    Sandscapes

    Many of us have played with sand art–the rotating frames filled with water, sand, and air. In this video, Shanks FX demonstrates some of the realistic and surrealistic landscapes you can create using this toy. It also makes for a neat fluid dynamics demonstration. The buoyancy of the trapped air bubbles lets the sand sift slowly down instead of falling immediately. And the sand descends in a variety of ways–sometimes laminar columns and other times wilder turbulent plumes. (Video credit and submission: Shanks FX/PBS Digital Studios)

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    “The Chase”

    Sometimes it takes timelapse photography to truly appreciate the dynamic behavior of our atmosphere. In “The Chase” Mike Olbinski, whose work we’ve featured previously, has captured some of the most incredible and stunning weather timelapse footage I have ever seen. Despite watching it repeatedly, I continue to be awed to the point that I have no words. Seriously, just watch it. Be amazed by the drama of our sky. (Video credit: M. Olbinski)

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    “En Plein Vol”

    Artist Antoine Terrieux’s “En Plein Vol” exhibit shows off the power of hair dryers. Parts of the exhibit, like the floating ball at 0:16, rely on Bernoulli’s principle and the moving stream of air the dryers generate. Others, like the smoke tornado at 0:39 or the (suspended) paper airplane at 0:56, use the hair dryers to generate vorticity essential to the installation. It’s a neat concept and very well executed. (Video credit: A. Terrieux; via io9; submitted by Joseph S. and Eliza M.)

  • Bubble Rupture

    Bubble Rupture

    Surface tension draws bubbles into spheres, but the balance of forces holding the sphere together is delicate. When pierced by a projectile, sometimes soap films can heal themselves, but often the film ruptures. Once a hole forms in the bubble, the film’s integrity is lost. Instead of holding the bubble together, surface tension pulls the soap film apart in a spray of thread-like ligaments that break into droplets. In the blink of an eye, the bubble is gone. (Image credit: W. Horton)