Tiny organisms live in a world dominated by viscosity. There’s no coasting or gliding. If a microorganism stops swimming, friction will bring it to a halt in less than the Keep reading
Tag: low Reynolds number flow
The Challenges of Micro Air Vehicles
Interest in micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) has proliferated in the last decade. But making these aircraft fly is more complicated than simply shrinking airplane designs. At smaller sizes and lower speeds, Keep reading
The Reynolds Number Illustrated
The dimensionless Reynolds number is a key concept in fluid dynamics, allowing scientists to distinguish regimes of flow between differing geometries and even different fluids. This video gives a great Keep reading
Brine Shrimp Swimming
For small creatures, swimming is dominated by viscosity. Here researchers use particle image velocimetry (PIV) to explore the flow field around brine shrimp. Its motion is divided into two vorticity-generating Keep reading
Viscous Fluid Falling on a Moving Belt
In this video a very viscous (but still Newtonian) fluid is falling in a stream onto a moving belt. Initially, the belt is moving quickly enough that the viscous stream Keep reading
Underwater Cloaking
Researchers have suggested that it may be possible to cloak submerged objects as they move through a fluid using layers of mesh and micro-pumps. By redirecting the fluid so that Keep reading
Reader Question: National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films
lazenby asks: Have you seen these guys? http://web.mit.edu/hml/ncfmf.html Yes, absolutely! Those videos, which date from the 1960s, are so useful that they’re still shown to undergraduates today. (Or at least Keep reading
Un-mixing a Flow
Laminar flow (as opposed to turbulence) has the interesting property of reversibility. In this video, physicists demonstrate how flow between concentric cylinders can be reversed such that the initial fluid Keep reading