Sneezing and coughing can spread pathogens both through large droplets and through tiny, airborne aerosols. Understanding how the nasal cavity shapes the aerosol cloud a sneeze produces is critical to Keep reading
Tag: droplets
“The Ballet of Colors”
Thomas Blanchard’s short film “The Ballet of Colors” plunges viewers into a warm spectrum of roiling oil and paint. Fluid dynamically speaking, it could be subtitled “the Plateau-Rayleigh instability” thanks Keep reading
A Drop’s Shape Effects
Falling raindrops get distorted by the air rushing past them, ultimately breaking large droplets into many smaller ones. This research poster shows how variable this process is by showing two Keep reading
“Trinity”
Inspired by the film Oppenheimer, artist Thomas Blanchard created “Trinity,” a short film imagining a nuclear explosion with macro-scale fluid motion. There’s clever video editing and compositing in this video, but Keep reading
Quick-Drying, Fast-Cracking
Water droplets filled with nanoparticles leave behind deposits as they evaporate. Like a coffee ring, particles in the evaporating droplet tend to gather at the drop’s edge (left). As the Keep reading
Explosively Jetting
Dropping water from a plastic pipette onto a pool of oil electrically charges the drop. Then, as it evaporates, it shrinks and concentrates the charges closer and closer. Eventually, the Keep reading
The Mystery of the Binary Droplet
What goes on inside an evaporating droplet made up of more than one fluid? This is a perennially fascinating question with lots of permutations. In this one, researchers observed water-poor Keep reading
Within a Drop
In this macro video, various chemical reactions swirl inside a single dangling droplet. Despite its tiny size, quite a lot can go on in a drop like this. Both the Keep reading
“Paradolia”
In “Paradolia,” filmmaker Susi Sie plays with pareidolia, our tendency to seek patterns in nebulous data — like faces on a slice of toast. Droplets of miscible and immiscible fluids Keep reading
A Mini Jupiter
Astronaut Don Pettit posted this image of a Jupiter-like water globe he created on the International Space Station. In microgravity, surface tension reigns as the water’s supreme force, pulling the Keep reading