When it comes to geophysics, there are all kinds of phenomena that depend on rotation. In this short video, researchers demonstrate one such phenomena — the centrifugal instability — in Keep reading
Tag: rotating flow
Calimero’s Uprising!
Here on FYFD posts often focus on research results, with animations and images showing only a tiny portion of the apparatus necessary to conduct that work. But in this timelapse, Keep reading
Evaporative Convection
Since we spend so much of our lives around transparent fluids like air and water, we often miss seeing some of their coolest-looking flows. Here, we see a layer of Keep reading
Zones and Stars
Large-scale rotating flows, like planetary atmospheres, tend to organize themselves into zones. Within a zone, flow remains essentially in an east-west direction and serves as a barrier that keeps heat Keep reading
Swirling the Wrong Way
When you swirl wine, you create a rotating wave that travels in the direction that you’re moving the glass. You would expect that anything floating atop that fluid would travel Keep reading
Liquid Sunbursts
Liquid sunbursts and swirling aquatic roses abound in photographer Mark Mawson’s work. Images like these are created from dropping ink into water and photographing it as it diffuses. For the Keep reading
Shark Tooth Instability
Imagine that you partially fill a horizontal cylinder with a viscous fluid, like corn syrup or honey. If that cylinder is still, the fluid will simply pool along the bottom. Keep reading
Rotating Jet
This photo, one of the winners of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC) annual photography contest, shows a rotating viscoelastic jet. Rotating liquid jets are common to many Keep reading
Suppressing Instability
The Rayleigh Taylor instability is a common fluid phenomenon in which the interface between fluids of differing densities becomes unstable. It’s what’s responsible for all those awesome pictures of milk Keep reading
Turning Into 2D
UCLA Spinlab has another great video demonstrating the effects of rotation on a fluid. In a non-rotating fluid, flow over an obstacle is typically three-dimensional, with flow moving over as Keep reading