This fantastic music video by Kim Pimmel is a beautiful merger of art and fluid dynamics. Using household goods (and some slightly more exotic ferrofluid), the video shows how mesmerizing diffusion, buoyancy, Marangoni flow, and other fluid effects can be up close. It may also be the first time I’ve ever seen fluid dynamics–specifically bubbles–used as characters! Also be sure to check out some of his previous videos, many of which also feature cool fluid dynamics. (Video credit and submission: K. Pimmel)
Videos
Sand Dunes
Sand dunes form with a gentle incline facing the wind and a steeper slip face pointing away from the wind. Most slip faces are angled at about 30 to 34 degrees–called the angle of repose. The shape is determined by the dune’s ability to support its own weight; add more sand and it will cascade down the slip face in a miniature avalanche. Similarly, if you disturb sand on the slip face by digging a hole at the base, you get the cascading collapse seen in this video. By removing sand, the dune’s equilibrium is broken and it can no longer support its weight. This makes sand flow down the slip face until enough is shifted that the dune can support itself. Being a granular material, the sand itself appears to flow much like a fluid, with waves, ripples and all. (Video credit: M. Meier; submitted by Boris M.)
Magnetic Putty
Sometimes fluids are slow-moving enough that it takes timelapse techniques to reveal the flow. Fog is one example, and, as seen above, magnetic silly putty is another. The putty is an unusual fluid in a couple of ways. First, having been impregnated with ferromagnetic nanoparticles, it is sensitive to magnetic fields, making it a sort of ferrofluid. And secondly, being silly putty, it’s a non-Newtonian fluid, meaning that it has a nonlinear response to deformation – a fact that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to knead putty versus striking it. With a strong enough magnet, the putty makes for an impressively tenacious creeping flow. (Video credit: I. Parks; via io9; submitted by Chad W.)
When Lava Meets Ice
What happens when lava meets ice or water? Artists and geologists are working together to explore these interactions by melting crushed basalt and pouring it onto different substrates. Ice is their classic example; instead of melting instantly through the ice, the lava is so hot that it creates a layer of steam between it and the ice. This steam helps the lava flow due to lower friction while also insulating the ice from the lava. It’s an example of the Leidenfrost effect. The end result is a very bubbly lava flow thanks to the steam trying to escape through the viscous lava. (Video credit: Science Channel; submitted by @jchawner)
Earth’s Aerosols
The motions of Earth’s atmosphere move more than just air and moisture. As seen in this animation built from NASA satellite data, the atmosphere also transports large amounts of small solid particles, or aerosols, such as dust. Each year the wind carries millions of tons of Saharan dust across the Atlantic, depositing much of it in the Amazon basin. This provides much needed nutrients like phosphorus to plants and animals in the Amazon; check out this video from the Brain Scoop to see what happens in areas that don’t receive these nutrients. Dust is only one of many sources for atmospheric aerosols, though. Sea salt, volcanic eruptions, and pollution are others. All of these aerosols serve as potential nucleation sites for raindrops or snowflakes, and their transport all around the globe by atmospheric winds means that seemingly local effects–like a regional drought or increased pollution in developing countries–can have global effects. (Video credit: NASA Goddard; submitted by entropy-perturbation)
Asteroid Impact
I often receive questions about how fluids react to extremely hard and fast impacts. Some people wonder if there’s a regime where a fluid like water will react like a solid. In reality, nature works the opposite way. Striking a solid hard enough and fast enough makes it behave like a fluid. The video above shows a simulated impact of a 500-km asteroid in the Pacific Ocean. (Be sure to watch with captions on.) The impact rips 10 km off the crust of the Earth and sends a hypersonic shock wave of destruction around the entire Earth. There’s a strong resemblance in the asteroid impact to droplet impacts and splashes. Much of this has to do with the energy of impact. The asteroid’s kinetic (and, indeed, potential) energy prior to impact is enormous, and conservation of energy means that energy has to go somewhere. It’s that energy that vaporizes the oceans and fluidizes part of the Earth’s surface. That kinetic energy rips the orderly structure of solids apart and turns it effectively into a granular fluid. (Video credit: Discovery Channel; via J. Hertzberg)
Popcorn Popping
The familiar popping behavior of popcorn is the combination of several events. When heated, unpopped kernels act like pressure vessels, managing to contain their boiling water content until a critical temperature of 180 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, nearly all kernels fracture. Popcorn’s jump doesn’t come from the fracture, though. Most of its acrobatics occur when a leg of starch branches out of the popping kernel. The starch acts somewhat like a muscle – after being compressed against the ground, it springs back, propelling the corn upward. Finally, by synchronizing high-speed video and audio recordings of popping corn, researchers determined that the pop in popcorn is not caused by fracture or rebound but instead is the result of the release of water vapor. (Image credit: TAMU NAL, source; research credit: E. Virot and A. Ponomarenko; submitted by Chad W.)
Making a Bottle Resonate
If you’ve ever blown across the top of a bottle to make it play a note, then you’ve created a Helmholtz resonator. Air flow across the top of the bottle causes air in and around the bottle neck to vibrate up and down. Like a mass on a spring, the air oscillates with a particular frequency that depends on the system’s characteristics. We hear this vibration as a a deep hum, but in the high-speed video above, you’re actually seeing the vibration as smoke pulsing in and out of the bottle. Helmholtz resonance shows up more than just in blowing across beer bottles; it’s also a factor in many resonating instruments, like the guitar. To learn more about the physics and mathematics of the effect, check out this page from the University of New South Wales. (Video credit: N. Moore)
5 Years of SDO
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is our premiere source for data on the sun. In honor of its five-year anniversary, NASA released this beautiful video compiling some of the highlights among the 2600 terabytes of data the spacecraft has recorded. SDO has captured some truly stunning footage over the years of sunspots, prominences, and eruptions. The latter two are examples of plasma flows and visible magnetohydrodynamics. SDO’s observations are also helping researchers determine what goes on just beneath the sun’s surface, where convection and buoyancy are major forces in the transport of heat generated from fusion in the star’s core. Incidentally, SDO’s launch featured some uncommonly stunning fluid dynamics as well. (Video credit: NASA Goddard)
Plasma
For those of us who are Earthbound, it’s easy to think of liquids and gases as being the most common fluids. But plasma–the fourth state of matter–is a fluid as well. Plasmas are essentially ionized gases, which, thanks to their freely flowing electrons, are electrically conductive and sensitive to magnetic fields. Their motions are described by a combination of the Navier-Stokes equations–the usual equations of motion for a fluid–and Maxwell’s equations–the equations governing electricity and magnetism. Studies of plasma motion often fall under the subject of magnetohydrodynamics and can include topics like planetary auroras, sunspots, and solar flares. (Video credit: SciShow)