Vibrate a pool of water, and you’ll get Faraday waves, ripple-like excitations that form their own distinctive pattern compared to the driving vibration. But you don’t have to vibrate a Keep reading
Tag: vibration
Ejecting Water from a Smartwatch
Making electronics water-resistant can be a challenge, but as this Slow Mo Guys video demonstrates, engineers have some clever ways to deal with unwanted liquids. The Apple Watch, for example, Keep reading
Toad Singing
With spring heading into summer, many parts of the United States enjoy a nighttime chorus of frogs and toads. These amphibians are singing to attract mates and delineate territory. Some, Keep reading
Measuring Contaminants in Drops and Bubbles
Rising bubbles and droplets are common in many chemical and industrial applications. But just a tiny concentration of contaminants on their surface can completely alter their behavior, disrupting coalescence and Keep reading
Singing in the MRI
We rarely consider just how complex the process is when we speak or sing. Sound waves produced in our larynx are shifted and amplified by the geometry of our throats, Keep reading
Robotic Research Facilities
One of the major challenges in fluid dynamics is the size of the parameter spaces we have to explore. Because many problems in fluid dynamics are non-linear, making small changes Keep reading
Avoiding Shear Thickening
Many substances – like the cornstarch and water mixture above – exhibit a property called shear-thickening. In these fluids, deforming them quickly causes the viscosity to increase dramatically. That shear-thickening occurs when particles Keep reading
Superwalkers
Walking droplets – drops that bounce their way across a pool of the same liquid without coalescing – have fascinated researchers in recent years with their unusual behaviors, some of Keep reading
Guiding Particles with Chladni Patterns
During the 19th century, Ernst Chladni and Michael Faraday independently explored the patterns formed by particles of different sizes placed on a vibrating plate. Faraday found that large particles accumulated Keep reading
Granular Instabilities
Granular mixtures show surprising similarities to fluids, even though their underlying physics differ. The latest example of this is a Rayleigh-Taylor-like instability that occurs when heavy particles sit atop lighter Keep reading