Take a mixture of a viscous liquid – like clay mud – and squeeze it between two glass plates and you’ll create a mostly-round layer of liquid. As you pry Keep reading
Tag: viscous fingering
Growing Fingers
Branching, tree-like structures are found throughout nature. Take a thin layer of a viscous fluid pressed between two glass plates and inject a less viscous fluid like air and you’ll Keep reading
Geological Flowers
These strange flower-like formations appear in a former limestone quarry in France. The black that you see is bitumen, or asphalt. These dendritic structures appear in spots where the rock Keep reading
“Kingdom of Colours”
Oil, paint, and soap combine to create a polychrome landscape in Thomas Blanchard’s “Kingdom of Colours” short film. Colorful droplets of paint coated in oil form anti-bubbles that skim along Keep reading
Fingering Under Elastic
Take a couple panes of glass and stick a viscous fluid in between them; you’ve now constructed what fluid dynamicists call a Hele-Shaw cell. If you inject a low-viscosity fluid, Keep reading
Fluid Fingers
Fluid phenomena can show up in unexpected places. The collage above shows patterns formed when an aluminum block is lifted during wet sanding, a polishing technique. The dendritic fingers are Keep reading
Viscous Fingers
Viscous fingers form between air and titanium dioxide sol-gel in this photograph. The two fluids are trapped in a thin gap between glass plates – a set-up known as a Keep reading
Viscous Fingers
Take a viscous fluid, like laundry detergent, and sandwich it between two plates of glass. Fluid dynamicists call this set-up a Hele-Shaw cell. If you then inject a less viscous Keep reading
Fluid Fingers
Differences in viscosity or surface tension between two fluids can lead to finger-like instabilities. Here food dye placed on corn syrup forms narrow tendrils driven by the differing surface tensions Keep reading
Viscous Fingers
Viscous liquid placed between two plates forms a finger-like instability when the top plate is lifted. The photos above show the evolution of the instability for four initial cases (top Keep reading