Anyone who’s painted a room at home is familiar with the frustration of drips. At certain inclinations, practically every viscous liquid develops these gravity-driven instabilities. They’re troublesome in manufacturing as Keep reading
Tag: thin fluid film
Perfecting Giant Bubbles
Whether young or old, everyone enjoys blowing soap bubbles, and the bigger the bubble, the more impressive it is. Researchers have been on a quest to discover how bubbles can Keep reading
The Colors of Soap
The brilliant and beautiful colors of a bubble are directly related the the thickness of the soap film surrounding it. When light shines on the soap film, some rays are reflected Keep reading
Science Off the Sphere: Liquid Lenses
Astronaut Don Pettit delivers more “Science Off The Sphere” in his latest video. Here he demonstrates diffusion and convection in a two-dimensional water film in microgravity. He notes that the viscous Keep reading
Science off the Sphere: Thin Films
Stuck here on Earth, it’s hard to know sometimes how greatly gravity affects the behavior of fluids. Fortunately, astronaut Don Pettit enjoys spending his free time on the International Space Station Keep reading
Surface Tension Instability
Droplets of oleic acid spread across a thin film of glycerol on a silicon wafer. The shapes here are driven by hydrodynamic instabilities, particularly Marangoni effects due to the differences Keep reading
Soap Film Flow Viz
Flowing soap films provide an educational and beautiful method for visualizing the wakes of objects in two-dimensional flows. High-speed photography highlights the interference patterns on the soap film, providing detail Keep reading
Drafting Flags
Wired Science has published a gallery of fluid dynamics photos and videos, several of which have been featured here previously. There’s some neat stuff there, well worth checking out. # Keep reading
Butterfly Soap Spiral
A stationary soap film disturbed by a flapping foil (seen in the top center) creates a butterfly-like double spiral roll. Two vortices form at the tip of the foil each Keep reading
Marangoni Convection in Space
In this Saturday Morning Science video, astronaut Don Pettit demonstrates Marangoni convection in microgravity using a water film with tracer particles, a soldering iron, and a flashlight. This same effect Keep reading