Tag: fluids lab

JFM China Symposia: Beijing

Video highlights from the third and final stop of the JFM China Symposia in Beijing. We were hosted by Tsinghua University with further speakers from Peking University, Xidian University, Beihang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Ke-Qing Xia describes how water in the ocean travels the entire globe over the course of 1000 years

 

Colm Caulfield explains how to the shape of a hanging chain is related to turbulence

 

Charles Meneveau discusses wind energy and its future as the current cheapest form of energy in the US

 

Photo: Christian Steiness

 

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JFM China Symposia: Hangzhou

I’m in China this week documenting the JFM Symposia ‘from fundamentals to applied fluid mechanics’ in the three cities of Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Beijing. Check out the CUP website for daily blog entries as well as some of my favourite video highlights from the scientific talks in Hangzhou below.

Detlef Lohse describes how a good scientist must be patient like a good bird-watcher as demonstrated by his experiments with exploding ice droplets

Hang Ding discusses falling droplets and shows a video of one hitting a mosquito

Quan Zhou presents some amazing visuals of Rayleigh-Taylor turbulence 

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JFM China Symposia: Shenzhen

I’m in China this week documenting the JFM Symposia ‘from fundamentals to applied fluid mechanics’ in the three cities of Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Beijing. I’ll be writing daily blog entries on the CUP website as well as posting some of my favourite video highlights from the scientific talks, starting with the first symposium in Shenzhen.

Detlef Lohse explains the evaporation of a drop of Ouzo (a traditional Greek alcohol)

Colm Caulfield describes the two types of mixing present in the ocean (including a fantastic visualisation of KH instability)

Anderson Shum demonstrates how a fluid can behave as a ‘dancing ribbon’

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Navier-Stokes: one equation to rule them all

A leading Millennium Prize Problem is the Navier-Stokes equation, which, if solved, could model the flow of any fluid – that means how aeroplanes navigate the skies, how water meanders in a river and how the flow of blood courses through your blood vessels… Understanding these equations in more detail will lead to scientific advances in all of these fields: better aircraft design, improved flood defences, and better drug delivery in the body. Fluids expert and mathematician Keith Moffatt took me down to the deep dark depths of Cambridge’s maths lab…

  • For most fluids, including air and water, the Navier-Stokes equations are based on Newton’s Laws and were first written down in the 19th century
  • The millennium problem is to answer the question of whether or not the equations can become infinite
  • It cannot be solved with a computer because a computer programme will break down before the singularity at infinity is reached
  • A real-world example is when two tornado-like vortices collide and undergo a process called ‘vortex reconnection’

You can listen to the full interview for the Naked Scientists here.

And you can read more about the Navier-Stokes equations and all of the Millennium Problems here.

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Making Waves

Waves are ubiquitous in the marine world, but how do we study them and why do they matter? I went along to the lab at Cambridge University’s Maths department to meet researcher Megan Davies Wykes…

 

  • Waves are created in a tank in the lab by moving a paddle backwards and forwards
  • There are two types: deep water waves and shallow water waves – the type is determined by how large the wave is compared to the depth of the water
  • Changing the speed of motion of the paddle does not alter the wave speed as it is determined entirely by the wavelength, which is set by the distance the paddle is moved
  • Internal waves in the ocean are very important for mixing which in turn helps us to understand how things such as climate change will affect the ocean

You can listen to the full interview for the Naked Scientists here.

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