Seals and sea lions often hunt fish in waters too dark or turbid to rely on eyesight. Instead, they follow their whiskers, using the turbulence generated by a fish’s wake. Keep reading
Tag: vortex-induced vibration
Walking in the Wake
Flow visualization is an important tool in fluid dynamics, and scientists have many ways to capture and visualize flow information. But our methods are not the only — or even Keep reading
Vortex Arms
A fixed cylinder will shed alternating vortices in its wake, but one allowed to oscillate forward and backward in the flow instead sheds simultaneous vortices. The shape of the wake 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
Vibrating in the Flow
Objects can obviously affect flows, but that’s not a one-way street. Flows can also affect objects, even ones as simple a circular cylinder. If you live somewhere with traffic lights Keep reading
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge
One of the most dramatic and famous engineering failures of the twentieth century is also one of the most complicated: the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. This early suspension Keep reading
The Sensitivity of a Seal’s Whiskers
Harbor seals and their brethren have a superpower that lets them track their prey even without sight or sound. It’s their whiskers, which are sensitive enough to follow the trail Keep reading
Shaking in the Wind
Sitting at a traffic stop on a windy day, you may have noticed the beam holding the traffic lights shaking steadily up and down. This phenomenon is called vortex-induced vibration. Keep reading
Vibrations from Vortices
Vortex shedding frequently happens in the wakes of non-streamlined bodies as a result of flow around the obstacle. Newton’s third law states that forces come in equal and opposite pairs, meaning that the Keep reading
Wake of a Rising Sphere
This flow visualization shows the wake left by a freely rising sphere. Observations of rising and falling spheres date at least back to Newton, who observed that the inflated hog Keep reading