Chemically speaking, oil and water don’t mix. But with a little fluid mechanical effort, it’s possible to make them an emulsion — a mixture of oil droplets in water or Keep reading
Tag: miscibility
Density Drift
This colorful photo shows three fluids — oil, water, and dish soap — illuminated by the rainbow reflection of a CD. The differing densities of each fluid creates a stratification Keep reading
Popping an Oil Balloon
Oil and water don’t mix — or at least they won’t without a lot of effort! In this video, we get to admire just how immiscible these fluids are as Keep reading
The Birth of a Liquor
A water droplet immersed in a mixture of anise oil and ethanol displays some pretty complicated dynamics. Its behavior is driven, in part, by the variable miscibility of the three 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
“Float”
In “Float” artist Susi Sie uses water and oil to create a whimsical landscape of bubbles and droplets. Coalescence is a major player in the action, though Sie uses some clever Keep reading
Sunset Flow
Day and night mix in this flow visualization of watercolor pigments and ferrofluid. The former, as suggested by their name, are water-based, whereas ferrofluids typically contain an oil base. This Keep reading
Flowing Through Tight Spaces
Fluid flow through porous media inside confined spaces can be tough to predict but is key to many geological and industrial processes. Here researchers examine a mixture of glass beads and water-glycerol Keep reading
Water Atop Oil
At first glance, this image looks much like the impact of any drop on a pool of the same liquid, but that’s not what you’re seeing. This is the impact Keep reading
Emulsions By Condensation
Oil and water are hard to mix, as any salad dressing aficionado will attest. Technically, the two fluids are immiscible – they won’t mix with one another – but one Keep reading