Researchers studying how fish swim have long focused on their tail fins and the flows created there. But a fish’s other fins have important effects, too, as seen in this Keep reading
Tag: CFD
Predicting Contamination in Urban Environs
The canyons of a city’s streets form a complex flow environment. To better understand the risks of a spreading contaminant, researchers simulated a release in lower Manhattan’s urban jungle. The Keep reading
A Bubble’s Path
Centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci noticed something peculiar about bubbles rising through water. Small bubbles followed a straight path, but slightly larger ones swung back and forth or corkscrewed upward. Keep reading
Swimming Intermittently
Many fish do not swim continuously; instead, they use an intermittent motion, swimming in a sudden burst and then coasting. This intermittent swimming is tough to simulate, due to its Keep reading
Exascale Simulations
Capturing what goes on inside a combustion engine is incredibly difficult. It’s a problem that depends on turbulent flow, chemistry, heat transfer, and more. To represent all of those aspects Keep reading
Why Moths Are Slow Fliers
Hawkmoths and other insects are slow fliers compared to birds, even ones that can hover. To understand why these insects top out at 5 m/s, researchers simulated their flight from Keep reading
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 Keep reading
Inside a Champagne Pop
When the cork pops on a bottle of champagne, the physics is akin to that of a missile launch in more ways than one. In this study, researchers used computational Keep reading
Asperitas Formation
In 2017, the World Meteorological Organization named a new cloud type: the wave-like asperitas cloud. How these rare and distinctive clouds form is still a matter of debate, but this Keep reading
Re-Entry For X-Wings
Fans of sci-fi and fantasy have a long-standing tradition of exploring the physics and/or practicality of creations in their fandom, and Star Wars fans are no exception. Here engineers ask Keep reading