Tag: fluids as art

Weather Posters
Weather Underground has created a whole series of posters celebrating and briefly explaining various weather phenomena. Many of their subjects are beautiful and unusual types of clouds like the lenticular clouds that form over mountains and hole-punch clouds created when supercooled water vapor gets disturbed. They have a few non-cloud phenomena we’ve discussed previously, too, such as dust devils and bizarre, wind-formed snow rollers. I highly encourage you to check out the full collection, which they’ve made available as phone and computer wallpapers as well as posters. Personally, these combine two of my favorite things: fluid dynamics and retro-style nature posters! (Image credit: Weather Underground)
January 12, 2017
“Pulse”
Photographer Mike Olbinski returns with another incredible storm-chasing timelapse video, this time all in black-and-white. To me, that choice helps “Pulse” emphasize the ominous majesty of these supercells and tornadoes by highlighting the textures that make up the clouds. Watching clouds in timelapse, they seem to materialize from nowhere as moisture drawn up from the land cools and condenses. Sped up, suddenly the convective rotation and the roiling turbulence inside clouds is perfectly clear. I especially love the sequence beginning at 2:25, where a distant black line slowly transforms into an incredible landscape marked with successive waves of rolling, turbulent clouds. Watch this one on a large screen at a high resolution, if you can. You won’t regret it! (Video credit: M. Olbinski)
January 10, 2017
Shot Through a Drop
Shoot a sphere through a drop with sufficient speed, and you’ll see something like the composite photo above. Going from right to left, the projectile is initially coated in liquid and stretches the fluid behind it as it continues flying. This forms a thin sheet of fluid called a lamella with a thicker, uneven rim at its far end. The lamella continues stretching until the projectile breaks through and detaches. Now the lamella starts rebounding back on itself as surface tension struggles to keep the fluid together. A new rim forms on the front, and both the front and back rims thicken as the lamella collapses. Along the rims thicker portions start forming droplets – like spikes on a crown – as the surface-tension-driven Plateau-Rayleigh instability starts breaking the structure down. The untenable sheet of fluid will break up into a cloud of smaller, satellite droplets when it can hold together no longer. (Image credit: V. Sechenyh et al., video)
January 9, 2017
“Kingdom of Colours”
Oil, paint, and soap combine to create a polychrome landscape in Thomas Blanchard’s “Kingdom of Colours” short film. Colorful droplets of paint coated in oil form anti-bubbles that skim along the liquid surface until they burst, dispersing new colors. One of my favorite touches in this video, though, are the branching fingers of color that appear repeatedly (most often in blue-violet). This is an example of a phenomenon known as the Saffman-Taylor instability. It’s a hallmark of a low viscosity fluid pushing into a higher viscosity one–like air into honey. (Image/video credit: T. Blanchard; via Flow Vis)
January 5, 2017
Paint Spilling Physics
There is a remarkable amount of physics contained in art. In this video, scientists from The Splash Lab explore some of the physics involved in pouring paint atop a rectangular post. The spreading paint transforms its shape repeatedly, and, at the corners of the post, it preserves a tiny history of all the colors poured. Paint sliding down the sides shifts from a thin sheet to a thicker jet that deposits color in waves. For tall posts, the distance the paint falls is long enough for instabilities to set in, producing a paint puddle that’s riddled with curves and waves between each color of paint. It’s a lovely reminder of the complexity inherent even within a simple action. (Video credit: R. Hurd et al.)
December 29, 2016
Erie Waves
Photographer Dave Sandford braved the cold and turbulent waters of Lake Erie in late fall to capture some remarkable wave action. Like on the ocean, waves in the Great Lakes are largely driven by winds, but lakes don’t develop the constant set of rolling waves that oceans do. Instead their waves are more erratic and unpredictable. Sandford focused on capturing the moment when wind-driven waves coming into shore collided with waves rebounding from piers or rocks along the shore. The results are waves that, through Sandford’s lens, look like exploding mountainsides. Such energetic waves mix sediment and nutrients in the lake, and the spray of droplets can even loft aerosols and pollutants from the water into the atmosphere. (Photo credit: D. Sandford; via Flow Vis)
December 28, 2016
“Oil Spill”
In “Oil Spill” artist Fabian Oefner explores the shapes and colors of oil floating atop water. An old adage tells us that oil and water don’t mix, but this is not perfectly true. Especially in low concentrations, oil can mix slightly with water, which is why the edges of Oefner’s creations become fuzzy and break down. For the most part, though, the thin layer of oil spreads across the water’s surface, its slight variations in thickness casting the different iridescent colors we observe – just the same as a soap bubble’s iridescence. The colorful patterns are a snapshot of motion in the oil; in some places it radiates outward, pulled by the stronger surface tension of water. In other places it forms plumes and swirls that may be the result of temperature variations or other disquiet motion in the surrounding water or air. (Image credits: F. Oefner)
December 13, 2016
Ink Drops Spreading
Ink drops atop a layer of glycerol spread in a beautiful fan of blue and white. The ink’s motion is the result of two processes: molecular diffusion and the Marangoni effect. Molecular diffusion is the mixing that occurs due to the random background motion of molecules. Since glycerol is a very viscous liquid, the ink is quite slow to spread in this manner.
The second factor, the Marangoni effect, is driven by differences in surface tension. The ink and glycerol have different surface tensions, and the exact values depend on concentration. Notice how the ink drops spread fastest from areas where the ink is densely concentrated. This tells us that the ink’s surface tension is lower than the glycerol’s. As a result, the glycerol’s higher surface tension tends to pull ink toward it. As the ink spreads and its concentration decreases relative to the glycerol, the ink-glycerol mixture’s surface tension increases. Since the difference between the surface tension of the mixture and the pure glycerol is not as large, the Marangoni force is reduced and the spreading slows. (Image credit: C. Kalelkar, source)
December 9, 2016
“Chemical Poetry”
In “Chemical Poetry” artists Roman Hill and Paul Mignot use fluid dynamics to create incredible and engaging visuals. With a stunningly close eye to fluids mixing and chemicals reacting, their imagery feels like gazing on primordial acts of creation or destruction. There’s even a sequence that feels like you’re watching an explosion in slow-motion, but there’s no CGI in any of it. This is just the beauty of physics laid bare, revealing the dances driven by surface tension, the undulations of a fluid’s surface, and the dendritic spread of one fluid into another – all cleverly lit and filmed for maximum effect. It is well worth taking the time to watch the whole video and check out more of their work. (Image/video credit and submission: NANO; GIFs via freshphotons)
November 30, 2016
Coarsening in a Soap Film
Flow in a soap film is driven by gravity’s efforts to thin the film and surface tension’s attempts to stabilize variations in thickness. Because evaporation guarantees that the soap film will eventually dry out, gravity typically wins the battle and causes a soap film to rupture. This video takes a close look at what happens in the film just before it ruptures. Black dots form in the thinnest region of the flow. These areas are not holes, but they appear black because they are thinner than any wavelength of visible light. Before rupture, the black dots begin coalescing with one another, first due to diffusion and later more rapidly due to convection in the soap film. Ultimately, the black dots are the harbingers of doom for the fragile bubble. (Video credit: L. Shen et al.)
November 22, 2016