Power plants (and other industrial settings) often need to cool water to control plant temperatures. This usually requires cooling towers like the iconic curved towers seen at nuclear power plants. Keep reading
Tag: evaporation
Active Cheerios Self-Propel
The interface where air and water meet is a special world of surface-tension-mediated interactions. Cereal lovers are well-aware of the Cheerios effect, where lightweight O’s tend to attract one another, Keep reading
“There is a crack in everything…”
When millimeter-sized drops of water infused with nanoparticles dry, they leave behind complex and beautiful residues. As water continues evaporating, the residues warp, bend, and crack. In this video, researchers Keep reading
“Last Breath of Autumn”
On a rainy autumn day, Agorastos Papatsanis headed to the forest in search of fungi. There he captured this fairytale-like scene with falling rain and drifting spores. Near the forest Keep reading
Self-Cleaning With Salt Critters
Even freshwater contains trace salts and minerals that cause scaly buildups as they evaporate. Getting rid of the scale usually requires toxic chemicals and/or lots of scrubbing, neither of which Keep reading
How Ferns Spread Themselves
Ferns don’t rely on pollen and pollinators to spread. Instead, they use a little water and a lot of ingenuity, as shown in this video from Deep Look. Peer underneath Keep reading
Skittering Drops
Drip some ethanol on a hot surface, and you’d expect it to spread into a thin layer and evaporate. But that doesn’t always happen, and a recent study looks at Keep reading
Drying Unaffected by Humidity
Water evaporates faster in dry conditions than in humid ones, but the same isn’t true of paint. Instead, paint’s drying time is largely independent of the day’s humidity. That’s because Keep reading
Gravity Changes Droplet Shapes
With small droplets, gravity usually has little effect compared to surface tension. An evaporating water droplet holds its spherical shape as it evaporates. But the story is different when you Keep reading
Colorful Drainage
Bright colors mark this slowly draining soap film. The film sits slightly off-horizontal, so flow shifts over time from the top of the frame to the bottom. The fluid is Keep reading