Category: Research

Encapsulating Drops
Sometimes a droplet needs a little protection while it’s traveling to its destination. When that’s the case, we often try to encapsulate it in a layer of material that won’t be affected by whatever environment the drop is traveling through. In this study, researchers aimed to give their drops not one but two layers of protection — in as simple a way as possible.
The team began with three layers of liquid. The lowest layer was water, the middle layer was an oil, and the top layer was a mixture of water and isopropyl alcohol. Next, they added glass particles that were denser than the alcohol, but less dense than the oil. This caused the particles to form a clump — a granular raft — along the interface between the alcohol and the oil (not shown). When the layer of particles became heavy enough, it began to sink into the oil, carrying some of the alcohol with them. This conglomeration formed the initial droplet of alcohol mixture encased in an armor of glass beads.
As this armored droplet sank, it approached the second interface: the oil-water interface. At this juncture, the team observed three different outcomes. When the glass particles were small or light, the armored drop would come to a rest at the oil-water interface. As the drop deformed, water would pierce the armor, causing the whole drop to rupture (Image 1).
In the second case, heavier particles caused the armored drop to sink through the oil-water interface, but a low oil viscosity meant that the oil film drained from the bottom of the drop before the drop was fully encapsulated. Once again, this let the water through and ruptured the droplet (Image 2).
In the final case, armored drops with just the right bead density and oil viscosity would sink through the oil-water interface until the oil pinched off behind the drop. This pinch-off allowed the oil to redistribute around the drop, encapsulating it in layers of both oil and particles, thereby protecting it as it continued its journey (Image 3). (Image credits: top – Girl with red hat, experiment – A. Hooshanginejad et al.; research credit: A. Hooshanginejad et al.)
August 16, 2022
Slow to Relax
Oobleck is a decidedly weird substance. Made from a dense suspension of cornstarch in water, oobleck is known for its mix of liquid-like and solid-like properties, depending on the force that’s applied. In a recent study, researchers took a look at what happens when you really push oobleck to the extreme. When the force applied to oobleck is small or slowly added, the water between cornstarch particles helps keep the particles apart and free of contact. It’s when the force is large that those particles start jamming up against each other and having friction between them, and then the oobleck suddenly acts like a solid. But what happens once that force is removed?
When the force is gone, we expect the particles to repel and for water to squeeze back into the spaces between them, breaking up the friction and allowing the oobleck to relax back to a liquid-like form. But the team found that sometimes the oobleck doesn’t relax as easily as expected; instead, it seems to retain some memory of its solid-like state, due to persisting friction between particles. (Image credit: T. Cox; research credit: J. Cho et al.)
August 11, 2022
Bubbles in Turbulence
In nature and industry, swarms of bubbles* often encounter turbulence in their surrounding fluid. To study this situation, researchers used numerical simulation to observe bubbles across a range of density, viscosity, and surface tension values relative to their surroundings. They found that density differences between the two fluids made negligible changes to the way bubbles broke or coalesced.
In contrast, viscosity played a much larger role. More viscous bubbles were less likely to deform and break, thanks to their increased rigidity. When looking at small deformations along the bubble interface, both density and viscosity had noticeable effects. With increasing bubble density, they observed more dimples on the interface; increasing the viscosity had the opposite effect, making the bubbles smoother. (Image credit: Z. Borojevic; research credit: F. Mangani et al.)
*We usually think of bubbles as air or another gas contained within a liquid. But this study’s authors use the term “bubble” more broadly to mean any coherent bits of fluid in a different surrounding fluid. Colloquially, this means their results apply to both bubbles and drops.
August 9, 2022
Rotating Waves of Grains
Rotating drums are a popular way to explore granular dynamics. Here, researchers fill a cylinder (seen below) with heavy grains and a low-viscosity fluid, then rotate the mixture about a horizontal axis. This sets up a contest between centrifugal forces and gravitational forces on the grains. At the right rotation rates, the grains form annular rings around the outside of the cylinder, where they rotate at a different speed than the fluid. This difference in speed between the two layers can trigger a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and cause waves along the interface between the grains and the fluid, as seen in the examples above. (Image and research credit: V. Dyakova and D. Polezhaev; top image adapted by N. Sharp)
August 4, 2022
Neptune’s Seasonal Changes
Ice giant Neptune orbits our sun once every 165 years, meaning that each season on the planet lasts about 41 years here on Earth. Currently, the side of Neptune facing us is entering early summer, but a recent survey of atmospheric measurements show that Neptune’s stratosphere is experiencing some unexpected changes. Between 2003 and 2018, the team found that global stratospheric temperatures actually decreased by 8 degrees Celsius. Even more dramatically, Neptune’s southern pole warmed by a full 11 degrees Celsius between 2018 and 2020. Both results hint that atmospheric patterns on the planet may be far more complex than current models assume. (Image credit: NASA/JPL; research credit: M. Roman et al.; via Physics World)
August 2, 2022
Swimming Together
Scientists have long pondered the possibilities of hydrodynamic benefits to the ways fish school. But most analyses of schooling have assumed a fixed spacing that’s far more orderly than what we observe in nature. In this experiment, researchers instead used a pair of robotic swimmers (essentially hydrofoils) to explore a range of swimming formations. What they found was a map of places where a second swimmer could easily “lock in” to a position relative to the leader and have their positioning stabilized by interactions with the leader’s wake (lower image). Interestingly, the beneficial regions extend much further downstream for fish positioned diagonally to the leader than they do for one directly following. With such a wide range of easily-stabilized following positions, it’s no wonder that schools of fish are amorphous instead of strictly crystalline! (Image credit: top – S. Pena Lambarri, map – J. Newbolt et al.; research credit: J. Newbolt et al.)
The shaded areas of this map represent areas where a second swimmer can passively “lock-in” relative to the leader’s position, shown in gray. This data is based on tests with robotic swimmers.
July 28, 2022
You’re Drunk, Toadlet
Most frogs and toads are excellent jumpers, taking off and landing with a control and grace that rivals elite athletes. Not so for the pumpkin toadlet. These species have become so miniaturized that the structures of their inner ears are too narrow for the fluid flow that helps frogs (and humans!) orient themselves in space. So while the toadlet certainly can jump, it careens through the air drunkenly and lands in any old direction. It’s hard not to laugh at their belly flops, somersaults, and straight-up head-first crashes. Fortunately, being so small, these landings don’t seem to hurt the toadlets, but one imagines they’re unpleasant nevertheless. Left to their own devices, the pumpkin toadlet prefers walking, slowly, like a chameleon; it might be the only way to stay within the limits of its inner ear. (Image credits: top – S. Kikuchi, others – R. Essner, Jr. et al.; research credit: R. Essner, Jr. et al.; via The Atlantic; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)
July 26, 2022
Listening to the Sizzle
The sizzle of frying food is familiar to many a cook, and that sound actually conveys a surprising amount of information. In this study, researchers suspended water droplets in hot oil and observed their behavior, both with high-speed video and with microphones. They found that these vaporizing drops created three types of cavities in the oil: an exploding cavity that breaks the surface, an elongated cavity that remains submerged, and an oscillating cavity that breaks up well below the surface. All three cavities flung oil droplets upward, and all three were acoustically distinct from one another. That means, as the authors suggest, that it might be possible to measure the aerosol droplets generated during frying simply by listening! (Image credit: fries – W. Dharma, others – A. Kiyama et al.; research credit: A. Kiyama et al.; via Cosmos; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)
July 21, 2022
Extreme Weather
Many of the exoplanets we’ve observed so far are extreme environments. WASP-121b is known as a hot Jupiter, a gas giant so close to its star that it orbits in just 30 hours. The exoplanet is tidally-locked to its star, meaning that one side always faces toward the star and the other faces away. This constant sunlight makes the daytime side of the planet hot enough to vaporize metals. A recent study combined observations of the exoplanet with numerical simulations to model both the daytime and nighttime atmosphere of the exoplanet. The results are pretty wild. The authors found evidence of 18,000 km/h winds that blow hot gases from the dayside to the nightside, where temperatures cool enough for some metals — primarily corundum — to rain out of the atmosphere. Given the trace amounts of other elements available in the atmosphere, the authors posit that the nightside of the planet may have rainfall of liquid rubies and sapphires. (Image credit: NASA/ESA; research credit: T. Mikal-Evans et al.; via Physics World)
July 19, 2022
Sonic Booms and Urban Canyons
In the days of the Concorde — thus far the world’s only supersonic passenger jet — noise complaints from residents kept the aircraft from faster-than-sound travel except over the open ocean. With many pursuing a new generation of civil supersonic aircraft, researchers are looking at how those sonic booms could interact with those of us on the ground.
In this study, researchers simulated the shock waves from aircraft interacting with single and multiple buildings on the ground. They found that the presence of a building increases the perceived sound level of the boom by about 7 dB at the most. But the most interesting results are what happens between multiple buildings.
If the street between buildings is wide enough, they each act independently, as if they were single buildings. But for narrower streets, the acoustics waves reflect and diffract between the buildings, creating a resonance that makes the acoustic echoes last longer. The effect is especially pronounced for a sonic boom traveling across a series of buildings, which mimics the layout of a dense city full of urban canyons. (Image credit: Concorde – M. Rochette, simulation – D. Dragna et al.; research credit: D. Dragna et al.)
Acoustic waves reflect and propagate through 2D urban canyons with widths of 10 meters (top), 20 meters (middle), and 30 meters (bottom).
July 14, 2022