In his short film, “Magic Fluids,” Roman De Giuli uses cyan, magenta, and yellow paints to generate a rainbow of macro colors. All the fluid motion you see is a practical Keep reading
Tag: instability
Wave Clouds in the Front Range
Last Sunday night metro Denver was treated to a rare sight: clouds resembling breaking waves formed near sunset. These are Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, and the comparison to ocean waves is apt, Keep reading
Driving Instabilities with a Twist
Imagine that you want to study how two fluids mix when a lighter fluid is pushed into a denser one. Conceptually, it’s a straightforward situation. It would be like having a Keep reading
Pollock Avoided Coiling
Artists are often empirical masters of fluid dynamics, as they must be to achieve the effects they want. Jackson Pollock was particularly known for his so-called dripping technique, in which he dropped Keep reading
Trails from a Delta Wing
Rhodamine (red) and fluorescein (green) dyes highlight the complex flows around a delta wing. To visualize the flow, researchers painted the apex of the delta wing with rhodamine, which gets drawn into Keep reading
A Broken Monitor’s Fingers
In this short video, the artists of Chemical Bouillon explore a broken LCD monitor and its liquid crystals. By sandwiching the fluid between thin, transparent sheets, they create dendritic shapes Keep reading
The Snowy Salt of the Dead Sea
At nearly 10 times saltier than the ocean, the Dead Sea is one of the saltiest places on Earth, and since 1979, scientists have observed it growing even saltier as snow-like salt Keep reading
Fingers of Clay
Take a mixture of a viscous liquid – like clay mud – and squeeze it between two glass plates and you’ll create a mostly-round layer of liquid. As you pry Keep reading
Oil-on-Water Impact
Although many people have studied droplet impacts over the years, there’s been remarkably little work done with oil-on-water impacts. One of the things that makes this situation different is that the oil Keep reading
Floccing Particles
Adding particles to a viscous fluid can create unexpected complications, thanks to the interplay of fluid and solid interactions. Here we see a dilute mixture of dark spherical particles suspended Keep reading