If you sandwich a viscous fluid between two plates and inject a less viscous fluid, you’ll get viscous fingers that spread and split as they grow. This research poster depicts Keep reading
Tag: Hele-Shaw cell
Frictional Fingers
Air pushes into a thin gap filled with water and granular particles in the labyrinth-like image above. The encroaching air pushes grains like a bulldozer’s blade, building up a compacted Keep reading
Controlling Finger Formation
When gas is injected into thin, liquid-filled gaps, the liquid-gas interface can destabilize, forming distinctive finger-like shapes. In laboratories, this mechanism is typically investigated in the gap between two transparent Keep reading
Granular Gaps
Push air into a gap filled with a viscous fluid, and you’ll get the branching, dendritic pattern of a Saffman-Taylor instability. Here, researchers use a similar set-up: injection into a Keep reading
Chemical Flowers
These “flowers” blossom as two injected chemicals react in the narrow space between two transparent plates. The chemical reaction produces a darker ring that develops a streaky outer edge due Keep reading
Saffman-Taylor Instability
Air and blue-dyed glycerin squeezed between two glass plates form curvy, finger-like protrusions. This is a close-up of the Saffman-Taylor instability, a pattern created when a less viscous fluid — here, Keep reading
Inside Viscous Fingers
Sandwich a viscous fluid between two transparent plates and then inject a second, less viscous fluid. This is the classic set-up for the Saffman-Taylor instability, a well-studied flow in which Keep reading
Falling Pancake Drops
Despite their round appearance, the droplets you see here are actually shaped like little pancakes. They’re sandwiched inside a Hele-Shaw cell, essentially two plates with a viscous fluid between them. Keep reading
Dengue Dengue Dengue
Musical duo Dengue Dengue Dengue create live audio/visual performances with fluid dynamics. Their visuals are created by adding various liquids and dyes atop an illuminated background. To add extra dynamism, Keep reading
Granular Fingers
Finger-like shapes often form on fluids injected between glass plates, but what happens when that injected fluid contains particles? That’s the situation in this recent study, where researchers sandwiched a Keep reading