How do damp clothes dry in air? Such a seemingly simple question has vexed physicists for years because it’s extremely difficult to observe what happens inside the cloth fibers. Now Keep reading
Tag: evaporation
Leidenfrost On Ice
We’ve seen many forms of Leidenfrost effect — that wild, near-frictionless glide that liquid droplets make on a very hot surface — over the years, but here’s a new one: Keep reading
Everlasting Bubbles
Soap bubbles are delicate and ephemeral, always a breath away from collapse due to thinning driven by gravity or evaporation. But that frailty can be countered. Adding microparticles to the Keep reading
Acrylic Paint Fractals
Here’s a simple fluids experiment you can try at home using acrylic paints, ink, isopropyl alcohol and a few other ingredients. When dropped onto diluted acrylic paint, a mixture of Keep reading
The Yarning Droplet
Marangoni bursting takes place in alcohol-water droplets; as the alcohol evaporates, surface tension changes across the liquid surface, generating a flow that tears the original drop into smaller droplets. Here Keep reading
Cracking Droplets
Droplets infused with particles — like coffee — can leave complex stains once they evaporate. Here researchers show the complex cracking pattern that develops as a droplet with nanoparticles evaporates. Keep reading
Triple Leidenfrost Effect
Droplets can skitter across a hot surface on a layer of their own vapor, thanks to the Leidenfrost effect. If two Leidenfrost droplets of the same liquid collide, they merge Keep reading
Modelling Volcanic Bombs
When magma meets water on its journey to the surface, the two form a large, partially molten chunk known as a volcanic bomb. As you would expect from their name, Keep reading
Fractal Frost
As nightly temperatures drop in the northern latitudes, many of us are beginning to wake up to frosty patterns on leaves, windows, and cars. Frost‘s spread is a complex dance Keep reading
Sliding Along
Robust, self-cleaning surfaces are a holy grail for many engineers, but they’re tough to achieve. One necessary ingredient for a self-cleaning surface is the ability to shed water, which is Keep reading