In the ocean, waves often curl over and trap air, becoming plunging breakers. How do surfactants like soap or oil affect this process? That’s the question behind this video, where Keep reading
Tag: surface tension
Paint Ejection
Shaking paint on a speaker cone and filming it in high speed is an oldie but a goodie. Here, artist Linden Gledhill films paint ejection at 10,000 frames per second, Keep reading
Bending in Bubbles
Inside a cavity with a square cross-section, bubbles form an array. The shapes of their edges are determined by surface tension and capillarity (lower half of center image). Adding an Keep reading
Self-Propelled Droplets
Drops of ethanol on a heated surface contract and self-propel as they evaporate. My first thought upon seeing this was of Leidenfrost drops, but the surface is not nearly hot Keep reading
“A Sense of Scale – Reminiscence”
In so much of fluid dynamics, size does not matter. We see the same patterns mirrored across nature from a fuel injection nozzle to galactic clusters. And no one plays Keep reading
Soapy Solutions
When a drop of soap falls into a pool of water, its surface-loving molecules spread out on the water’s surface. Exactly how the soap spreads depends on the local concentration Keep reading
A Fractal Raft From a Spinning Top
File this one under Cool Things I Would Have Never Thought Of. In this video, researchers play around with the flow around a spinning top and end up creating a Keep reading
Free Contact Lines
How a simple drop of water sits on a surface is a strangely complicated question. The answer depends on the droplet’s size, its chemistry, the roughness of the surface, and Keep reading
Backswimmers
Backswimmers rule the surface of ponds, streams, and other bodies of water. These insects spend much of their time clinging just beneath the air-water interface, where they hunt larvae and Keep reading
Escaping the Flood
Fire ants clump together into giant rafts to stay alive during floods. But these rafts won’t form with just any number of ants. Researchers found that individual ants will actually Keep reading