Tag: low Reynolds number flow

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    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 they showed several of them to us when I was junior!) They can seem a bit slow by current standards, but the films are full of great demonstrations of basic fluid mechanics. If the links on that page don’t work (or, if like me, you can’t stream RealPlayer), a lot of the videos can also be found on YouTube by searching for individual titles. The Low Reynolds Number Flow video is one of my favorites because it’s hosted by G. I. Taylor, one of the the most prolific and influential fluid mechanicians of the 20th century.

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    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 state is obtained (to within the limits of molecular diffusion, of course!)

    For more examples, see the first half of this video.