Rhodamine (red) and fluorescein (green) dyes highlight the complex flows around a delta wing. To visualize the flow, researchers painted the apex of the delta wing with rhodamine, which gets drawn into Keep reading
Tag: wake
Asymmetric Wakes
When a ship moves through water, it leaves a distinctive V-shaped wake behind it. In the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin made some of the earliest theoretical studies of this phenomenon, calculating that Keep reading
Entraining Bubbles
If you stand on a bridge and watch the current flow past pylons below, you’ll see disturbances marking the wakes. Dragging a rod – or an oar – at a high Keep reading
Reshaping the Wake to Decrease Drag
When it comes to the aerodynamics of cars, there’s only so much streamlining one can do. In the end, most cars have a certain boxy-ness as a matter of practicality; Keep reading
Powdery Trails
Because air and water are colorless and transparent, we cannot see most of the flows around us – but they’re always there. In a recent series, photographer Jess Bell has Keep reading
Dinosaurs, Propellers, and Hiding Objects
The latest FYFD/JFM video is out, and it’s all about the interactions between structures and flows! We learn about plesiosaur-inspired underwater robots, how turbulence affects air-water interfaces, and how adding Keep reading
Swirls of Color
These beautiful swirls show the wake downstream of a thin plate. Here water is flowing from left to right and dye introduced on the plate (upstream and unseen in the 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
Symmetric Wakes
Nature is full of remarkable patterns and moments of symmetry. This image shows the wake behind two rotating cylinders. Half of the cylinders are visible at the far left. The Keep reading