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
Tag: vortex shedding
Swirls in the Wake
Rocky islands make excellent atmospheric swirls, as seen here around Guadalupe Island. Winds blowing in from the ocean get forced up and around the island’s topography, resulting in vortices that Keep reading
The Eerie Singing of the Golden Gate Bridge
Recent changes to the Golden Gate Bridge’s guardrails have created a new soundscape in the Bay Area. Under high winds, the bridge gives off an eerie, otherworldly wail that can Keep reading
Nighttime Streets
Clouds spiral behind the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria in this nighttime satellite imagery. Although it’s not entirely unusual to see these von Karman vortex street clouds in the wakes of 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 Swimming of a Dead Fish
When I was a child, my father would take me trout fishing, and I spent hours marveling from the riverbank at the trouts’ ability to, seemingly effortlessly, hold their position Keep reading
Star Wars Aerodynamics
Science fiction is not always known for hewing to scientific fact, so it will probably come as little surprise that Star Wars’ ships have terrible aerodynamics. But it’s nevertheless fun Keep reading
Glorious Vortex Street
Satellite imagery often reveals patterns we might struggle to see from the ground. Here Gaudalupe Island off the western coast of Mexico perturbs the atmosphere into a series of vortices. Keep reading
A Buoyant Rise
Hold a buoyant sphere like a ping pong ball underwater and let it go, and you’ll find that the ball pops up out of the water. Intuitively, you would think Keep reading