Many industrial processes, including those producing aluminum and “green” hydrogen, use electrodes to speed up chemical reactions. Unfortunately, bubbles that form on the electrode reduce its efficiency anywhere from 10 Keep reading
Tag: surface roughness
Why Tornado Alley is North American
Growing up in northwest Arkansas, I spent my share of summer nights sheltering from tornadoes. Central North America — colloquially known as Tornado Alley — is especially prone to violent Keep reading
Paris 2024: Beach Versus Indoor Volleyballs
Some of the differences between beach volleyball and indoor volleyball are obvious, like the number of players allowed — two versus six — and the courts — a smaller sand Keep reading
Unsticking in Jumps
Soft materials tend to be sticky, and once they’re adhered to a surface, they’re often harder to remove than they were to attach — think of Scotch tape stuck to Keep reading
Rough Surfaces
In fluid dynamics, we’re often concerned with flow moving past a solid surface — air past an airplane wing, water past fish scales, oil between moving parts — and those Keep reading
Dancing Over Ridges
When flowing over a ridged surface, particles follow a drifting, helical trajectory. In this video, researchers delve into the physics behind this phenomenon. Differences in the pressure gradient along different Keep reading
Fractal Frost
As nightly temperatures drop in the northern latitudes, many of us are beginning to wake up to frosty patterns on leaves, windows, and cars. Frost‘s spread is a complex dance Keep reading
Tokyo 2020: Volleyball Aerodynamics
Like footballs and baseballs, the trajectory of a volleyball is strongly influenced by aerodynamics. When spinning, the ball experiences a difference in pressure on either side, which causes it to swerve, per the Magnus Keep reading
How Animals Stay Dry in the Rain
Getting wet can be a problem for many animals. A wet insect could quickly become too heavy to fly, and a wet bird can struggle to stay warm. But these Keep reading
Sliding Foams
What happens when a foam interacts with a sliding surface? That’s the question at the heart of this study, which finds three major regimes of foam-surface interaction. On smooth surfaces Keep reading