Turbulent flows are ubiquitous, but they’re also mindbogglingly complex: ever-changing in both time and space across length scales both large and small. To try to unravel this complexity, scientists use Keep reading
Tag: turbulent energy cascade
Testing Turbulence’s Limits
Understanding chaotic, turbulent flows has long challenged scientists and engineers due to their sheer complexity. In turbulent flows, energy cascades from the largest scales — like the kilometer-size cross-section of Keep reading
Vortex Collisions Leave Clues to Turbulence
Vortex ring collisions have long been admired for their beauty, but they’re now shedding light on the fundamental interactions that lead to turbulence. By dying just the cores of colliding Keep reading
An Introduction to Turbulence
With some help from Physics Girl and her friends, Grant Sanderson at 3Blue1Brown has a nice video introduction to turbulence, complete with neat homemade laser-sheet illuminations of turbulent flows. Grant Keep reading
Visualizing Turbulence
Turbulence, the seemingly random and chaotic state that fluids often tend toward, can be difficult to wrap one’s head around. Turn your faucet on high or pour milk into your Keep reading
Breaking Up Turbulence
Under most circumstances, we think about flows changing from ordered and laminar to random and turbulent. But it’s actually possible for disordered flows to become laminar again. This is what Keep reading
Turbulent Volcanic Plumes
Volcanic eruptions produce some of the largest flows on Earth. These towering ash clouds were imaged from orbit in May 2017 as an eruption began on Alaska’s Bogoslof Island. The Keep reading
Turbulence in the Solar Wind
One of the key features of turbulent flows is that they contain many different length scales. Look at the plume from an erupting volcano, and you’ll see eddies that are Keep reading
Volcanic Turbulence
One of the characteristics of turbulence is its large range of lengthscales. Consider the ash plume from this Japanese volcano. Some of the eddy structures are tens, if not hundreds, Keep reading