FYFD

Tag: turbulence

  • The Beauty of the Great Red Spot

    The Beauty of the Great Red Spot

    Jupiter is home to one of the most famous storms in the solar system, the Great Red Spot, which Earth observations place at a minimum of 180 (Earth) years in duration.  Some evidence suggests that it may have been observed by humans as early as 1665. The magnitude of such a storm is almost unimaginable. At its narrowest point, the storm is still as wide as our entire planet and observations from the Voyager crafts indicate that the storm has 250 mph winds. The scale of mixing and turbulence around the storm, seen in photographs, is stunning and beautiful. (Photo credits: NASA/Voyager 1 and Michael Benson; submitted by oneheadtoanother)

  • Fluidic Public Art by Charles Sowers

    Fluidic Public Art by Charles Sowers

    Artist Charles Sowers creates exhibits and public art focused on illuminating natural phenomenon that might otherwise go unnoticed, and much of his work features fluid dynamics directly or indirectly.  “Windswept” and “Wave Wall” are both outdoor exhibits that show undulations and vortices corresponding to local wind flow. Other pieces explore ferrofluids through magnetic mazes or feature foggy turbulence.  My own favorite, “Drip Chamber”, oozes with viscous fluids whose dripping forms patterns reminiscent of convection cells. Be sure to check out his website for videos of the exhibits in action. (Photo credits: Charles Sowers; submitted by rreis)

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    Following a Breaking Wave

    It’s fascinating to sit on the beach and watch the waves roll in and break, but rarely do we get a view like the one in this video.  Here researchers have created a breaking wave in a wave tank and recorded the wave as it travels the length of the tank with a high-speed camera moving at the same speed as the wave crest.  This perspective, moving alongside the fluid, is a Lagrangian coordinate system; if one instead stood still and watched the wave roll past, it would be an Eulerian measurement. Traveling with the wave, we can see how a lip forms on the wave crest, then rolls down, capturing a tube of air.  As water begins to flow over the lip, perturbations grow, causing ripples in the laminar curtain.  Then the water strikes the main wave and rebounds turbulently, creating a familiar white cap. In the second half of the video, the process is shown from above, highlighting the entrainment of air and the creation of the bubbles that form the white cap of a breaking wave. (Video credit: R. Liu et al)

  • Liquid Mushrooms

    Liquid Mushrooms

    The Rayleigh-Taylor instability can form at the interface between two liquids of different density under the influence of gravity, but a similar instability can occur in the absence of gravity. The image sequence above shows the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability, which occurs between two liquids of differing densities (regardless of their orientation) when impulsively accelerated. In this case, the experiment was conducted in a drop tower to simulate microgravity with the apparatus dropped on a spring to provide the impulse. As the instability grows, asymmetries appear.  Nonlinear dynamics will amplify these distortions, eventually leading to turbulent breakdown. (Photo credit: C. Niederhaus/NASA Glenn, J. Jacobs/University of Arizona)

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    Air Entrainment

    When a liquid jet falls into a pool, air is often entrained along with the liquid, creating a cavity and, often, bubbles. Shown above is video of a low-speed laminar jet entering a quiescent pool. The jet appears to entrain a thin film of gas, which then breaks up in a three-dimensional fashion, despite the symmetry of the incoming jet.  As the speed of the incoming jet is increased and turbulence is introduced, the resulting air entrainment becomes violent and chaotic. For additional information and videos, see Kiger and Duncan 2012 and their supplemental videos. (Video credit: K. Kiger and J. Duncan)

  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

    Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

    In recent years unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have grown in popularity for both military and civilian application and are shifting from a remotely controlled platform to autonomous control. Since no pilot flies onboard an UAV, these craft are much smaller than other fixed-wing aircraft, with wingspans that may range from a few meters to only centimeters. At these sizes, most fixed-wing airfoil theory does not apply because no part of the wing is isolated from end effects. This complicates the prediction of lift and drag on the aircraft, particularly during maneuvering and necessitates the development of new predictive methods and control schemes. Shown above are flow visualizations of a small UAV executing a perching maneuver, intended to allow the craft to land as a bird does by scrubbing speed with a high-angle-of-attack, high-drag motion. (Photo credit: Jason Dorfman; via Hizook; requested by mindscrib)

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    Unsteady Rocket Nozzle

    This numerical simulation gives a glimpse of flow inside an unsteady rocket nozzle.  The nozzle is over-expanded, meaning that the exhaust’s pressure is lower than that of the ambient atmosphere. A slightly over-expanded nozzle causes little more than a decrease in efficiency, but if the nozzle is grossly over-expanded, the boundary layer along the nozzle wall can separate and induce major instabilities, as seen here. In the first segment of the video, turbulent structures along the nozzle wall boundary layer are shown; note how the boundary layer becomes very thick and turbulent after the primary shock wave (shown in gray). This is due to the flow separating near the wall.  The second half of the video shows the unsteadiness this can create. The primary shock wave splits into two near the wall, creating a lambda shock wave, named for the shape of the lower case Greek letter. This shock structure is indicative of strong interaction between the boundary layer and shock wave. (Video credit: B. Olson and S. Lele)

  • Rocket Exhaust

    Rocket Exhaust

    A fiery jet of exhaust remains amid plumes of smoke as a Soyuz rocket lifts off from Baikonur Cosmodrome bound for the International Space Station. The lengthscales of such turbulence range from tens of meters to only millimeters, highlighting the incredible difficulty of accurately capturing and describing the fluid motion of a practical engineering problem. (Photo credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi; via Visual Science)

  • Supercomputed Fluids

    Supercomputed Fluids

    Computational fluid dynamics and supercomputers can produce some stunning flow visualizations.  Above are examples of turbulence, the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, and the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Be sure to check out LCSE’s website for more; they’ve included wallpapers of some of the most spectacular ones. (Photo credits: Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, #)

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    The Veil Nebula

    There is no grander scale for the observation of fluid dynamics than that of the astronomical. Here Hubble astronomers discuss the formation of the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant formed some 5,000-10,000 years ago.  Wisps of gas and plasma remain, creating stunning astronomical landscapes that are the result of shock waves, turbulence, diffusion, and other processes familiar to us here on Earth. (Video credit: ESA/Hubble)