Category: Phenomena

Growing Turbulence
Flow patterns can change dramatically as fluid speed and Reynolds number increase. These visualizations show flow moving from left to right around a circular plunger. The lower Reynolds number flow is on the left, with a large, well-formed, singular vortex spinning off the plunger’s shoulder. The image on the right is from a higher Reynolds number and higher freestream speed. Now the instantaneous flow field is more complicated, with a string of small vortices extending from the plunger and a larger and messier area of recirculation behind the plunger. In general, increasing the Reynolds number of a flow makes it more turbulent, generating a larger range of length scales in the flow and increasing its complexity. (Image credit: S. O’Halloran)
April 16, 2014
What Sound Looks Like
NPR’s Skunk Bear Tumblr has a great new video on the schlieren visualization technique. The schlieren optical set-up is relatively simple but very powerful, as shown in the video. The technique is sensitive to variations in the refractive index of air; this bends light passing through the test area so that changes in fluid density appear as light and dark regions in the final image. Since air’s density changes with temperature and with compressibility, the technique gets used extensively to visualize buoyancy-driven flows and supersonic flows. Since sound waves are compression waves which change the air’s density as they travel, schlieren can capture them, too. (Video credit: A. Cole/NPR’s Skunk Bear)
April 11, 2014
Wingtip Vortices
Newton’s third law says that forces come in equal and opposite pairs. This means that when air exerts lift on an airplane, the airplane also exerts a downward force on the air. This is clear in the image above, which shows a an A380 prototype launched through a wall of smoke. When the model passes, air is pushed downward. The finite size of the wings also generates dramatic wingtip vortices. The high pressure air on the underside of the wings tries to slip around the wingtip to the upper surface, where the local pressure is low. This generates the spiraling vortices, which can be a significant hazard to other nearby aircraft. They are also detrimental to the airplane’s lift because they reduce the downwash of air. Most commercial aircraft today mitigate these effects using winglets which weaken the vortices’ effects. (Image credit: Nat. Geo./BBC2)
April 10, 2014
Kelvin Wakes
Ducks, boats, and other objects moving along water create a distinctive V-shaped pattern known as a Kelvin wake. As the boat moves, it creates disturbance waves of many different wavelengths. The constructive interference of the slower waves compresses them into the shock wave that forms either arm of the V. Sometimes evenly spaced wavelets occur along the arms as well. Between the arms are curved waves that result from other excited wave components. The pattern was first derived by Lord Kelvin as universally true at all speeds – at least for an ideal fluid – but practically speaking, water depth and propeller effects can make a difference. Recently, some physicists have even suggested that above a certain point, an object’s speed can affect the wake shape, but this remains contentious. (Image credit: K. Leidorf; via Colossal; submitted by Peter)
April 8, 2014
How Tsunamis Cross the Ocean
Last week an earthquake in Chile raised concerns over a possible tsunami in the Pacific. This animation shows a simulation of how waves would spread from the quake’s epicenter over the course of about 30 hours. In the open ocean, a tsunami wave can travel as fast as 800 kph (~500 mph), but due to its very long wavelength and small amplitude (< 1 m), such waves are almost unnoticeable to ships. It’s only near coastal areas, when the water shallows, that the wave train slows down and increases in height. Early in the video, the open ocean wave heights are only centimeters; note how, at the end of the video, the wave run-up heights along the coast are much larger, including the nearly 2 meter waves that impacted Chile. The power of the incoming waves in a tsunami are not their only danger, though; the force of the wave getting pulled back out to sea can also be incredibly destructive. (Video credit: NOAA/NWS/Pacific Tsunami Warning Center; via Wired)
April 7, 2014
Convection Cells
Human eyesight is not always the best for observing how nature behaves around us. Fortunately, we’ve developed cameras and sensors that allow us to effectively see in wavelengths beyond those of visible light. What’s shown here is a frying pan with a thin layer of cooking oil. To the human eye, this would be nothing special, but in the infrared, we can see Rayeigh-Benard convection cells as they form. This instability is a function of the temperature gradient across the oil layer, gravity, and surface tension. As the oil near the bottom of the pan heats up, its density decreases and buoyancy causes it to rise to the surface while cooler oil sinks to replace it. Here the center of the cells is the hot rising oil and the edges are the cooler sinking fluid. The convection cells are reasonably stable when the pan is moved, but, even if they are obscured, they will reform very quickly. (Video credit: C. Xie)
April 2, 2014
Water and Aerogel
Aerogel is an extremely light porous material formed when the liquid inside a gel is replaced with gas. When combined with water, aerogel powders can have some wild superhydrophobic effects. Here water condensed on a liquid nitrogen cooler has dripped onto a floor scattered with aerogel powder from the nitrogen’s shipping container. The result is that the water gets partially coated in aerogel powder and takes on some neat properties. Its contact angle with the surface increases – in other words, it beads up – which is typical of superhydrophobicity. When disturbed, the water breaks easily into droplets which do not immediately recombine upon contact. With sufficient distortion, they can rejoin. You can see some other neat examples of aerogel-coated water behaviors in this second video as well. (Video credit: ophilcial; submitted by Jason I.)
March 31, 2014
The Kaye Effect
The Kaye effect is particular to shear-thinning non-Newtonian fluids – that is, fluids with a viscosity that decreases under deformation. The video above includes high-speed footage of the phenomenon using shampoo. When drizzled, the viscous liquid forms a heap. The incoming jet causes a dimple in the heap, and the local viscosity in this dimple drops due to the shear caused by the incoming jet. Instead of merging with the heap, the jet slips off, creating a streamer that redirects the fluid. This streamer can rise as the dimple deepens, but, in this configuration, it is unstable. Eventually, it will strike the incoming jet and collapse. It’s possible to create a stable version of the Kaye effect by directing the streamer down an incline. (Video credit: S. Lee)
March 28, 2014
Freshwater Flux
These satellite images show the effects of a sudden influx of warm freshwater on sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. On the left are natural color satellite images of Canada’s Mackenzie River delta where it enters the Beaufort Sea. On the right are temperature maps of the ice and water surface temperatures for the same regions. In June 2012, the coastal sea ice that had been blocking the river’s delta broke, releasing a massive discharge of river water. The natural color images show brown and tan sediment reaching far out from the river delta, but the temperature maps on the right are even more dramatic. Warmer river water has spread many hundreds of kilometers from the delta, melting sea ice and raising the open water surface temperatures by an average of 6.5 degrees Celsius. The effects of river discharge on sea ice melt are increasing as inland Arctic areas warm more in the summers and the sea ice becomes thinner and more vulnerable each year. (Image credits: NASA Earth Observatory)
March 24, 2014
How Dogs Drink
This high-speed footage shows how a dog drinks. The dog’s tongue curls backwards, creating a large area of surface contact with the water. When the dog pulls its tongue back up, water adheres to it and is drawn upward in a column. The dog then closes its mouth around the water before it falls. Fundamentally, this is the same mechanism as the one cats use. Part of the reason that dogs are messier drinkers, though, is that the backwards curl of their tongue picks up extra water. Because the dog has no cheeks, there’s no way to move this water from the underside to the top of the tongue and so the water just falls back out. (Video credit: Oxford Scientific Films; submitted by Carolyn W.)
March 21, 2014