FYFD

Category: Art

  • 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 causes a rebounding Worthington jet, which reaches its pinnacle just as a second droplet strikes. The impact spreads into an umbrella-like skirt consisting of a thin, expanding liquid sheet with a thicker rim. The rim itself is unstable, breaking into regularly spaced filaments and tiny satellite droplets that shoot outward before the entire structure collapses into the pool. One especially cool aspect of watching this in video is seeing how the blue dye from each droplet spreads as the water splashes and rebounds. You can see the set-up Reugels uses for his photography here. (Video credit: M. Reugels and L. Lehner)

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    “Supermajor”

    In Matt Kenyon’s “Supermajor,” oil appears to flow upward against gravity from a puddle into a can. This optical illusion is a stroboscopic effect similar to the one that makes car wheels seem to rotate backwards. The human eye and brain can be tricked into seeing the stream of oil as being suspended or even moving backwards by changing the flicker of the lighting relative to the rate at which the drops fall. If you watch the videos carefully, the pedestal is vibrating, which imparts a specific frequency to the falling drops. Combine this with a light that flickers at a slightly different frequency than that of the vibration and you can make the stream of drops appear to move up or down. It’s a helpful way to trick the brain into freezing fluid motion we would normally be unable to appreciate without high-speed cameras. (Video credit: Science Gallery; exhibit credit: Matt Kenyon; submitted by jshoer)

  • Ink Diffusion

    Ink Diffusion

    Alberto Seveso’s gorgeous high-speed photos of ink diffusing in water have a dramatic sense of texture to them. Though still delicate, the whorls of fluid seem almost solid enough to touch. Watch the edges, though, and you can see thin wisps of color and hints of instabilities. Like cream poured into coffee, these ink sculptures are short-lived. Some of his works are available as prints or wallpapers (zip file). (Photo credit: Alberto Seveso)

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    “Pacific Light”

    This lovely video from Ruslan Khasanov showcases the beautiful interplay of surface tension, diffusion, and immiscibility in common fluids. With soy sauce, oil, ink, soap, and a little gasoline, he creates a mesmerizing world of color and motion. It’s a great reminder of the wonders that populate our daily lives, if we just look closely enough to see them. (Video credit: R. Khasanov; via Wired; submitted by Trevor)

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    “Perpetual Puddle Vortex Experiment”

    Anthony Hall’s “Perpetual Puddle Vortex Experiment” is an intriguing display of several physical mechanisms. What looks like a puddle is actually a vortex constantly sucking fluid down a hole in the table. The liquid is re-circulated into the puddle so it never disappears. The table itself is treated to be hydrophobic, causing the distinctive curvature and large contact angle of the puddle’s rim. The oils mixed in float on top, creating patterns of foam that visualize the swirling motions of the fluid as the vortex pulls it in.   (Video credit and submission by: A. Hall)

  • “Liquid Jewel”

    “Liquid Jewel”

    Just a reminder that today is your last chance to participate in our reader survey. If you haven’t had a chance yet to fill it out, please do. The data are very important to us, not just for this site, but for improving science outreach online in general. Thank to those who have filled out the survey and especially those who left suggestions. You guys have some great ideas!

    Today’s image is from artist Fabian Oefner’s “Liquid Jewel” series, featuring paint-filled balloons moments after rupture. Oefner has several series displaying physical forces as visual media, including the previously featured “Black Hole” and “Millefiori” photos. (Photo credit: F. Oefner)

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    “Adrift”

    Sometimes the time scales of a flow can mask its similarities to other flows. Simon Christen’s “Adrift,” a video of timelapsed fog in the San Francisco Bay area, shows just how these low clouds undulate and flow over the land the way a stream of water flows over and around stones. From the flow of gases in a stellar nursery down to the channels of a lab-on-a-chip, the same physics governs fluids everywhere, and there are always similarities to be found and exploited in our efforts to understand and explain fluid dynamics. (Video credit: S. Christen; via io9)

  • The Colors of Soap

    The Colors of Soap

    The brilliant and beautiful colors of a bubble are directly related the the thickness of the soap film surrounding it. When light shines on the soap film, some rays are reflected from the upper surface of the film, while others are refracted through the film and reflect off its lower surface. These reflected rays have different phase shifts and their interference is what causes the colors we observe. The color patterns themselves reveal the interior flow of the soap film, in which gravity tries to thin the film and surface tension tries to distribute the film evenly. (Photo credit: R. Kelly, A. Fish, D. Schwichtenberg, N. Travers, G. Seese)

  • Bubbles, Drops, and Colors

    Bubbles, Drops, and Colors

    The immiscibility of oil and water creates a multitude of bubbles of all sizes. A lack of miscibility occurs when the forces between like molecules are very strong for two liquids–essentially the oil molecules and the water molecules are so much more strongly attracted to themselves than they are to one another that they cannot mix. Surface tension–another expression of molecular forces–pulls the oil into droplets that float in the water and refract the light in such lovely ways. (Photo credit: Vendula Adriana Kaprálová Hauznerová; via thinxblog)

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    Supercell Thunderstorm

    Photographer Mike Olbinski has captured a spectacular timelapse of a supercell thunderstorm over the plains of Texas. Supercells are characterized by a strong, rotating updraft known as a mesocyclone, seen clearly in the video. These storms are commonly isolated occurrences, forming when horizontal vorticity in the form of wind shear is redirected upwards by an updraft. Such a strong updraft is typically created by a capping inversion, a situation where a layer of warmer air traps the colder air beneath it. (This is why one sees a distinctive cut-off at the top of some clouds.) As warm air rises from the surface, either the air above the cap will cool or the air below the cap will warm. Either situation results in an instability with cooler air on top of warmer air, providing a catalyst for the kind of dramatic weather seen here. (Video credit: M. Olbinski; via io9)