FYFD

Tag: fluids as art

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    “Dendrite Fractals”

    In this short film from the Chemical Bouillon team, dark ink drops spread in dendritic fractal patterns after being deposited on an unknown transparent liquid. Although the patterns look similar to those of the Saffman-Taylor instability, I suspect what we see here is actually driven by surface tension and not viscosity.

    The authors describe the ink they used as a “special old” “tree ink,” which — putting on my fountain pen aficionado hat — probably means some variety of iron gall ink. These inks draw on chemicals extracted from trees and other plants to create a permanent, waterproof ink. They tend to be highly acidic, which could play a role in the pattern formation seen here. (Video and image credit: Chemical Bouillon)

  • Frozen Wavelets

    Frozen Wavelets

    Photographer Eric Gross captured these surreal alpine landscapes in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Although the lake’s surface appears to have frozen waves, the prevailing theory is that these mounds and divots occur when snowdrifts form atop the lake, melt and refreeze. Over multiple melting and freezing cycles, the lake builds up with what appear to be wind-driven waves frozen in time. (Image credit: E. Gross; via Colossal)

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    Colorful Dissipation

    Colorful eddies swirl in this short video from photographer Karl Gaff. Formed near the boundary at the bottom of the frame, these eddies act to dissipate some of the energy in the flow. Structures like these are key in turbulent flows, where energy must pass from large eddies to smaller and smaller ones until they reach a size where viscosity can extinguish them. (Video, image, and submission credit: K. Gaff)

    P.S. – Today’s post is FYFD’s 2,500th! Crazy, right? That means we have a pretty enormous archive. Want to explore? Click here for a random post.

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    “The Other Side”

    “The Other Side” is a short film imagining fluids on the other side of people’s eyes. The fast-paced editing makes this one feel rather different from Thomas Blanchard’s other films, which often take the time to linger on the mixing of soaps, inks, and paints that form the bulk of the imagery. There are hints of ferrofluids here, too, but like much of the action, if you blink you’ll miss it.

    Strange as it may sound, there’s actually a strong connection between eyes and fluid dynamics, whether you’re considering the optimal length for eyelashes, the way a tear film coats the eye, or how vision changes in microgravity. (Image and video credit: T. Blanchard)

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    Paint Versus Hydrogel

    In this bizarre short film, we get to see a battle between dissolution and absorption. I think the Chemical Bouillon team has coated hydrogel beads in a layer of paint and then immersed them in water. As the beads absorb water, they expand and grow, tearing their fragile outer layer of paint to smithereens.

    One thing that struck me when watching several of the sequences is just how regular the hole spacing in the paint is for the round hydrogels. That hints at an orderly breakdown in the solid paint layer while the interior hydrogel polymer symmetrically expands. It’s a little like watching holes grow in a splash curtain. (Video and image credit: Chemical Bouillon)

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    The World in a Droplet

    Capturing refracted images in a droplet is a popular pastime among high-speed photographers, and in this solo Slow Mo Guy outing, we get to see that process in video. Physically, the subject is a simple drop of water, which on impact with a pool, rebounds into a Worthington jet and ejects one or more droplets from its tip. Despite hundreds of years of study, it’s still a joy to watch, especially at 12,000 frames per second.

    It’s also not the easiest image to capture, and one thing I rather enjoy about this video is how it gives you a sense of the trial and error involved in capturing just the right view. Even without having to worry about the timing issues, there is a lot of fiddling with lenses, focus, lights, and positioning — something familiar not just to photographers and videographers but to many researchers as well! (Image and video credit: The Slow Mo Guys)

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    “Otherworld, Vol. 1”

    Roman De Giuli’s “Otherworld, Volume 1” is a beautiful exploration of color and flow. Glittery particulates act as tracers in the flow, reminiscent of the way rheoscopic fluids do. In many sequences, the glitter lends a sense of texture to the flow. Without context, I cannot say whether those are true flow features, but they certainly remind me of instabilities like Tollmien-Schlichting waves. (Image and video credit: R. De Giuli)

  • Captured by Waves

    Captured by Waves

    Acoustic levitation and optical tweezers both use waves — of sound and light, respectively — to trap and control particles. Water waves also have the power to move and capture objects, as shown in this award-winning poster from the 2019 Gallery of Fluid Motion. The central image shows a submerged disk, its position controlled by the arc-shaped wavemaker at work on the water’s surface. The complicated pattern of reflection and refraction of the waves we see on the surface draws the disk to a focal point and holds it there.

    On the bottom right, a composite image shows the same effect in action on a submerged triangular disk driven by a straight wavemaker. As the waves pass over the object, they’re refracted, and that change in wave motion creates a flow that pulls the object along until it settles at the wave’s focus. (Image and research credit: A. Sherif and L. Ristroph)

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    Bouncing Off Defects

    The splash of a drop impacting a surface depends on many factors — among them droplet speed and size, air pressure, and surface characteristics. In this award-winning video from the 2019 Gallery of Fluid Motion, we see how the geometry of a superhydrophobic surface can alter a splash.

    When a drop falls on a protruding superhydrophobic surface, like the apex of a cone, it can be pierced from the inside, completely changing how the droplet rebounds and breaks up. The variations the video walks us through are all relatively simple, but resulting splashes may surprise you nevertheless. (Image and video credit: The Lutetium Project)

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    A Dance of Hydrogen Bubbles

    Hydrogen bubbles rise off zinc submerged in hydrocholoric acid in this short film from the Beauty of Science team. In high-speed video, the rise of the bubbles is stately and mesmerizing. Notice how the smallest bubbles appear as perfect spheres; for them, surface tension is strong enough to maintain that spherical shape even against the viscous drag of their buoyant rise. Larger bubbles, formed from mergers both seen and unseen, have a harder time staying round. In them, surface tension must battle gravitational forces and drag from the surrounding fluid. (Image and video credit: Beauty of Science; via Laughing Squid)