For many engineering students, their first exposure to fluid dynamics comes in a heat transfer class. The typical focus in these classes is not on the underlying physics but on Keep reading
Tag: transition
“Le Temps”
Thomas Blanchard is back with another beautiful music video. This one features ink cascading over various shapes underwater. Lots of tiny mushroom-shaped Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities here caused by the ink’s greater Keep reading
The Coexistence of Order and Chaos
One of the great challenges in fluid dynamics is understanding how order gives way to chaos. Initially smooth and laminar flows often become disordered and turbulent. This video explores that Keep reading
Spots of Turbulence
One of the enduring mysteries of fluid dynamics lies in the transition between smooth laminar flow and chaotic turbulent flow in the area near a wall. That region, known as Keep reading
HIFiRE
Earlier this month, an international team launched a successful hypersonic flight test in Australia. The Hypersonic International Research Experimentation (HIFiRE) Flight 5b was launched atop a two-stage rocket and reached Keep reading
How Fluid Dynamics Saved the Space Shuttle
New FYFD video! In which Dianna Cowern (Physics Girl) joins me to explore boundary layer transition and how a couple of small bits of roughness could be a huge problem Keep reading
Brazuca
Since 2006, Adidas has unveiled a new football design for each FIFA World Cup. This year’s ball, the Brazuca, is the first 6-panel ball and features glued panels instead of Keep reading
Incense in Transition
A buoyant plume of smoke rises from a stick of incense. At first the plume is smooth and laminar, but even in quiescent air, tiny perturbations can sneak into the Keep reading
Stalling
[original media no longer available] At high angles of attack, the flow around the leading edge of an airfoil can separate from the airfoil, leading to a drastic loss of Keep reading
Swirling Jets
In fluid dynamics, we like to classify flows as laminar–smooth and orderly–or turbulent–chaotic and seemingly random–but rarely is any given flow one or the other. Many flows start out laminar Keep reading