In “Alive,” filmmaker Christopher Dormoy explores acrylic paints and the variety of ways in which the medium can be used. From a fluids perspective, there’s dripping, viscous flow, turbulent eddies, Keep reading
Tag: viscous flow
Granular Gaps
Push air into a gap filled with a viscous fluid, and you’ll get the branching, dendritic pattern of a Saffman-Taylor instability. Here, researchers use a similar set-up: injection into a Keep reading
Honeybee Feeding
Busy bees feed on millions of flowers for each kilogram of honey they produce. To gather nectar, bees use their hairy tongues, which project out of a sheath-like cover. Protraction Keep reading
A Bubble’s Path
Centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci noticed something peculiar about bubbles rising through water. Small bubbles followed a straight path, but slightly larger ones swung back and forth or corkscrewed upward. Keep reading
Saffman-Taylor Instability
Air and blue-dyed glycerin squeezed between two glass plates form curvy, finger-like protrusions. This is a close-up of the Saffman-Taylor instability, a pattern created when a less viscous fluid — here, Keep reading
Eruption in a Box
In layers of viscous fluids, lighter and less viscous fluids can displace heavier, more viscous liquids. Here, researchers demonstrate this using four fluids sandwiched between layers of glass and mounted Keep reading
Falling Pancake Drops
Despite their round appearance, the droplets you see here are actually shaped like little pancakes. They’re sandwiched inside a Hele-Shaw cell, essentially two plates with a viscous fluid between them. Keep reading
Contact-Line Dissipation
In the confines of a narrow tube, a flow’s energy gets dissipated in two places: inside the bulk fluid and along the contact line. The former is standard for all Keep reading
Mud Pots
Mud pots, or mud volcanoes, form when volcanic gases escape underlying magma and rise through water and earth to form bubbling mud pits. I had the chance to watch some Keep reading
Tiny Symmetric Swimmers
Microswimmers live in a world dominated by viscosity, and in viscous fluids, symmetric motion provides no propulsion. That’s why bacteria and other tiny organisms use cilia, corkscrew flagella, and other Keep reading