Category: UK Fluids Network

Building bio-inspired vehicles to explore Mars

The air density on Mars is 1/100th of that on Earth which means that current airborne vehicles cannot be used to explore the planet. Jeremy Pohly, at the University of Alabama Huntsville, is designing new bio-inspired vehicles – based on bumblebees – which he hopes will be used in the near future for the human exploration of Mars.

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.

Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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Simulating turbulence over canopies to improve air quality

By improving our understanding of turbulent flow over canopies we can design better cities to improve air quality – just one of the applications of the work of Alfredo Pinelli, a professor at City University of London working on Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of turbulence.

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.

Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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How do dandelions spread their seeds?

How are dandelion seeds able to travel distances of over 150km across oceans, with only small feathery bristles and the power of the wind? According to research by Cathal Cummins at the University of Edinburgh, the answer can be found in the fluid dynamics of the air flow around the plants ‘micro-parachute’, and in the future it could lead to improved flight for miniaturised vehicles such as drones.

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.

Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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How do citrus fruits create such a strong smell?

Citrus fruits contain small pockets of liquid which burst upon contact releasing a jet of strong smelling oil into the air. The strong smell is designed to attract animals to the site to help to spread the seeds of the fruit as far as possible. Andrew Dickerson at the University of Central Florida has recorded the squirting motion using high speed cameras to try to understand the exact process of these ‘micro-jets’ of citrus oil.

 

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.

Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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Levitating Objects on an Air Table

Air-tables create a thin film of air capable of supporting objects and causing them to levitate. By adding grooves to the table or the object, Professor John Hinch at the University of Cambridge was able to control the objects motion and describe the resultant acceleration in terms of a simple scaling relationship involving gravity and the aspect ratio.

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.

Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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How do Insects Walk on Water?

Using the surface tension of water and a hydrophobic coating on their legs, many insects are able to walk on water. The surface tension acts like an invisible blanket across the top of the water, while the hydrophobic coating on the insects legs means that they are repelled from water molecules, much like the repulsion of two magnets with the same pole. By studying the simple case of a hydrophobic sphere being dropped into water from different heights, Daniel Harris and his team at Harvard University were able to improve our understanding of the mechanism of water-walking and use it to help build water-walking robots.

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference. Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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How do Bubbles Freeze?

Freezing bubbles are not only beautiful, but also demonstrate incredibly complex physics. Here, Professor Jonathan Boreyko explains how bubbles freeze with examples of slow motion videos filmed in his laboratory at Virginia Tech.

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.

Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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How Strong is an Avalanche?

Measuring the forces present in an avalanche using light. Amalia Thomas from the University of Cambridge explains how to measure the forces between colliding particles in an avalanche based on their photo-elastic response and refractive index.

 

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.

Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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Brazil Nut Effect in Avalanches and Cereal

The brazil nut effect describes the movement of large particles to the top of a container after shaking. The same effect also occurs in avalanches where large blocks of ice and rocks are seen on the surface, and in a box of cereal where the large pieces migrate to the top and the smaller dusty particles remain at the bottom. In this video, Nathalie Vriend and Jonny Tsang from the University of Cambridge explain how the granular fingering instability causes granular convection and particle segregation, with examples of experiments and numerical simulations from their research.

 

This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference. Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.

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