Tag: electrical field

The Rose-Window Instability
This polygonal pattern is known as the rose-window instability. It’s formed between two electrodes – one a needle-like point, the other flat – separated by a layer of oil. The pointed electrode’s voltage ionizes the air nearby, creating a stream of ions that travel toward the flat electrode below. Oil is a poor conductor, however, so the ions build up on its surface until they’re concentrated enough to form a dimple that lets them reach the lower electrode. At higher voltages, the electrical forces driving the ions and the gravitational force trying to flatten the oil reach a balance in the form of the polygonal cell pattern seen above. Smaller cells form near the needle electrode, where the electrical field is strongest and the temperature is highest, as revealed in thermal and schlieren imaging (lower images) that shows a warm stream of gas impacting there.
As a final note, I’ll add that the latest in this research comes from a paper by a Pakastani teenager. It’s never too early to start contributing to research! (Image and research credit: M. Niazi; via NYTimes; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)
October 12, 2017
Equatorial Streaming

Here you see a millimeter-sized droplet suspended in a fluid that is more electrically conductive than it. When exposed to a high DC electric field, the suspended drop begins to flatten. A thin rim of fluid extends from the drop’s midplane in an instability called “equatorial streaming”. As seen in the close-up animation, the rim breaks off the droplet into rings, which are themselves broken into micrometer-sized droplets thanks to surface tension. The result is that the original droplet is torn into a cloud of droplets a factor of a thousand smaller. This technique could be great for generating emulsions of immiscible liquids–think vinaigrette dressing but with less shaking! (Image credit: Q. Brosseau and P. Vlahovska, source)
July 17, 2017
Electric Coiling
A falling jet of viscous fluid–like honey or syrup–will often coil. This happens when the jet falls quickly enough that it gets skinnier and buckles near the impact point. Triggering this coiling typically requires a jet to drop many centimeters before it will buckle. In many manufacturing situations, though, one might want a fluid to coil after a shorter drop, and that’s possible if one applies an electric field! Charging the fluid and applying an electric field accelerates the falling jet and induces coiling in a controllable manner.
An especially neat application for this technique is mixing two viscous fluids. If you’ve ever tried to mix, say, food coloring into corn syrup, you’ve probably discovered how tough it is to mix viscous substances. But by feeding two viscous fluids through a nozzle and coiling the resulting jet, researchers found that they could create a pool with concentric rings of the two liquids (see Figure C above). If you make the jet coil a lot, the space between rings becomes very small, meaning that very little molecular motion is necessary to finish mixing the fluids. (Image credits: T. Kong et al., source; via KeSimpulan)
February 23, 2016
Ode to Bubbles
Boiling water plays a major role in the steam cycles we use to generate power. One of the challenges in these systems is that it’s hard to control the rate of bubble formation when boiling. In this video, researchers demonstrate their new method for bubble control in a clever and amusing fashion. The twin keys to their success are surfactants and electricity. Surfactant molecules, like soap, have both a polar (hydrophilic) end and a non-polar (hydrophobic) end. By applying an electric field at the metal surface, the researchers can attract or repel surfactant molecules from the wall, making it either hydrophobic or hydrophilic depending on the field’s polarity. Since hydrophobic surfaces have a high rate of bubble formation, this lets the scientists essentially turn nucleation on and off with the flip of a switch! (Video credit: MIT Device Research Lab; see also: research paper, MIT News Video, press release)
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February 3, 2016
Liquid Crystal Films
Smectic liquid crystals can form extremely thin films, similar to a soap bubble, that are sensitive to electrically-induced convection. Here an annular smectic film lies between two electrodes. When a voltage is applied across it, positive and negative charges build up on the surface of the film near their respective electrodes. The electrical field surrounding the fluid pushes on the surface charges, causing flow inside the film. Above a threshold voltage, an instability forms and the film develops into a series of counter-rotating vortices, which spin faster as the voltage increases. The color variations in the video above are due to differences in the film’s thickness, much like iridescence of a soap bubble. (Video credit: P. Kruse and S. Morris)
November 25, 2013
Floating Water Bridges
Water bridges that seem to float on air are an electrohydrodynamic phenomenon. By filling two beakers with extremely pure deionized water and applying a large voltage across them, flow is induced from one beaker to the other, as seen in the first few seconds of the video above. This flow is stable enough that the beakers can then be separated by a few centimeters without disturbing the bridge. Gravity tends to make the water bridge sag and capillary action tries to thin the bridge, but both effects are countered by the polarization forces induced in the water by the electric field. You can learn much more about the effect and see both photos and videos of it in action at Elmer Fuchs’ webpage. The flow visualization videos are especially neat! (Video credit: E. C. Fuchs)
October 28, 2013
Electrowetting
The electrowetting effect can change the shape of a liquid droplet on a surface by applying a voltage across the surface and droplet. Surface tension is a kind of measure of the energy required to maintain a certain drop shape, and that energy can be both chemical and electrical. In the video above, the droplet maintains a small contact area naturally (with no voltage). It expands and flattens under an electrical charge. Varying the voltage will change the degree to which the droplet flattens, but only to a point. Electrowetting is used to control variable lenses and some types of electronic displays. The technology may be used to replace current generation LCDs. (Video credit: V. Arya/Duke University)
May 16, 2013
The Water Bridge
This short film offers an artistic look at the phenomenon of the water bridge. When subjected to a large voltage difference, such as the 30 kV used in the film, flow can be induced between water in two separated beakers. This creates a water bridge seemingly floating on air. There are two main forces opposing the bridge: gravity, which causes it to sag, and capillary action, which tries to thin the bridge to the point where it will break into droplets. These forces are countered by polarization forces induced at the liquid interface due to the electrical field separating the water’s positive and negative charges. This separation of charges creates normal stresses along the water surface, which counteracts the gravitational and capillary forces on the bridge. The artist has done a beautiful job of capturing the unsteadiness and delicacy of the phenomenon. (Video credit: Lariontsev Nick)
January 9, 2013
“Cascades”
Ryan Teague’s “Cascades” music video features the enchanting process of ice growth. A chamber full of supercooled water vapor subject to a strong electric field is stimulated to grow crystals by providing a needle as the initial nucleation site. Because the vapor is supercooled, it will freeze upon contact with the nucleation site; the electric field keeps the water molecules aligned so that the crystal patterns formed are more even. The tree-like pattern seen here is called dendritic crystal growth; branches form at faults in the crystalline pattern. (Video credit: Ryan Teague, Village Green, Words are Pictures; via Gizmodo)
June 19, 2012
Moving Droplets with Electric Fields
Many microfluidic devices employ techniques that manipulate droplet motion for applications like sorting, manufacturing, or precisely controlling chemical reactions at a small scale. The video above shows the oscillations of a droplet on an inclined surface as it is perturbed with an electric field. (Video credit and submission: K. Nichols)
May 10, 2012