The rough picture of Earth’s interior — a crust, mantle, and core — is well-known, but the details of its inner structure are more difficult to pin down. A recent Keep reading
Tag: viscosity
Marangoni Blossoms
When surface tension varies along an interface, fluids move from regions of low surface tension to higher surface tension, a behavior known as the Marangoni effect. Here, a drop of Keep reading
Saving Screens with Shear-Thinning Fluids
These days glass screens travel with us everywhere, and they can take some big hits on the way. Manufacturers have made tougher glass, but they continue to look for ways Keep reading
Evolving Fingers
If you sandwich a viscous fluid between two plates and inject a less viscous fluid, you’ll get viscous fingers that spread and split as they grow. This research poster depicts Keep reading
Weathering Spilled Oil
As long as we continue to extract and transport oil, marine oil spills will continue to be a problem. Recent work shows that spilled oil weathers differently depending on both Keep reading
Can Water Solve a Maze?
Inspired by a simulation, Steve Mould asks a great question in this video: can water solve a maze? Yes — with some caveats. Steve makes two different maze patterns — Keep reading
Finger Painting Physics
Spreading paint with a brush or with fingers is familiar activity for most people. It’s also similar to processes used in industry for spreading thin layers of paint and other Keep reading
Bubbles in Turbulence
In nature and industry, swarms of bubbles* often encounter turbulence in their surrounding fluid. To study this situation, researchers used numerical simulation to observe bubbles across a range of density, Keep reading
Viscosity and Quantum Mechanics
Viscosity describes a fluid’s resistance to changing its shape. Like surface tension, it’s a fundamental property of a fluid that comes from the interactions between molecules. But viscosity is a Keep reading
Swapping Emulsions
Chemically speaking, oil and water don’t mix. But with a little fluid mechanical effort, it’s possible to make them an emulsion — a mixture of oil droplets in water or Keep reading