Venus flower basket sponges have an elaborate, vase-like skeleton pocked with holes that allow water to pass through the organism. A recent numerical study looked at how the sponge’s shape Keep reading
Tag: porous flow
Why Inkjet Paper Curls
Printed pages from inkjet printers tends to curl up over time. Researchers found that this long-term curl correlates with the migration of glycerol — one of the solvents used in Keep reading
Do Droughts Worsen Floods?
In recent years many areas have seen record droughts followed by sudden, massive rainfalls. Such wild swings raise the question: does drought-parched soil make flooding worse? That’s the question Grady Keep reading
Groundwater-Structure Interactions
Groundwater can sometimes wind up in unexpected places, given the way it interacts with subsurface structures. In this Practical Engineering video, Grady discusses the paths that groundwater takes around structures Keep reading
Seeing Through
Often researchers are interested in flows around and between objects, but seeing those flows is a challenge in a crowded field of view. One useful trick for this problem is Keep reading
Chaotic Mixing in Porous Media
One of the peculiar characteristics of viscous, laminar flows is that they are reversible. Squirt dye into glycerin, stir it one way, then the opposite direction, and the dye returns Keep reading
Inside Drying Wood
Wood must dry before it can be used in most applications, but with its complex internal structure exactly how wood dries out has been unclear. New experiments combining MRI and Keep reading
Lake Stars
As snow-covered frozen lakes melt, stars appear on their surface. These lake stars form around holes in the ice where (relatively) warm water seeps up into the slush layer. The Keep reading
In Search of a Better Espresso
Of specialty coffee drinks, espresso has the most cup-to-cup variation in quality. For those who are not coffee aficionados — such as yours truly — espresso is made by forcing Keep reading
Peering Between Particles
Turbulence is not the only way to mix fluids. Even a steady, laminar flow can be an effective mixer if geometry lends a hand. Above, two dyes, fluorescein (green) and Keep reading