Related papers: Can mosquitoes fly in the rain?
When a liquid drop falls on a solid substrate, the air layer in between them delays the occurrence of liquid--solid contact. For impacts on smooth substrates, the air film can even prevent wetting, allowing the drop to bounce off with…
Using high-speed photography coupled with optical interference, we experimentally study the air entrapment during a liquid drop impacting a solid substrate. We observe the formation of a compressed air film before the liquid touches the…
When do droplets merge and when do they bounce? Over the last 10 years, advances in experimental techniques, such as high-speed cameras, have enabled us to make important discoveries on how the dynamics of thin gas films can influence the…
The impact of a jet of droplets upon surfaces of varying hydrophobicity is studied via high-speed imaging. Microstructures on silicone surfaces consisting of cylindrical pillars of varying sizes and spacings are utilized to enhance…
Stability of flapping flight, a natural requirement for flying insects, is one of the major challenges for designing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). To better understand how a flying insect could stabilize itself during hover, we have…
We present fluid dynamics videos illustrating wetting splashing-produced by water drop impact onto hydrophobic microstructures at high impact velocity ($\sim 3$ ms$^{-1}$). The substrate consists of regular and transparent microtextures in…
Water droplets coalesce into larger ones in atmospheric clouds to form rain. But droplets on collision courses do not always coalesce due to the cushioning effects of the air between them. The extent to which these so-called hydrodynamic…
"Cicada: a Heavy but Agile Flyer" is a fluid dynamic video submitted to Gallery of Fluid Motion in APS-DFD 2011. Comparing to other insects, cicadas can generate much higher lift to overcome their large body weight. The hidden mechanism may…
Intuitively, slow droplets stick to a surface and faster droplets splash or bounce. However, recent work suggests that on non-wetting surfaces, whether microdroplets stick or bounce depends only on their size and fluid properties, but not…
Droplet velocities used in impact studies were investigated using high-speed photography. It was determined that droplets do not reach terminal velocity before a typical impact, raising the question of how to predict impact velocity. This…
The collision of water and elastic liquid drops with a thin cylinder (thread) is studied. The droplet flight trajectory and the cylinder axis are mutually perpendicular. Attention is focused on the difference between collisions of water…
Studying water droplets is a rich lesson in fields of fluid dynamics, nonlinear systems, and differential equations. Understanding various physical aspects of raindrops can help us in understanding drop dynamics, rainfall density…
The rich structures arising from the impingement dynamics of water drops onto solid substrates at high velocities are investigated numerically. Current methodologies in the aircraft industry estimating water collection on aircraft surfaces…
The dynamics of a mosquito population depends heavily on climatic variables such as temperature and precipitation. Since climate change models predict that global warming will impact on the frequency and intensity of rainfall, it is…
Rain drops form in clouds by collision of submillimetric droplets falling under gravity: larger drops fall faster than smaller ones and collect them on their path. The puzzling stability of fogs and non-precipitating warm clouds with…
This paper experimentally investigates the effect of viscosity on the outcomes of collisions between a regular stream of droplets and a continuous liquid jet. A broad variation of liquid viscosity of both the drop and the jet liquid is…
Drops impacting on a surface are ubiquitous in our everyday experience. This impact is understood within a commonly accepted hydrodynamic picture: it is initiated by a rapid shock and a subsequent ejection of a sheet leading to beautiful…
We conducted micro-gravity experiments to study the outcome of collisions between sub-mm-sized dust agglomerates consisting of \mu m-sized SiO2 monomer grains at velocities of several cm/s. Prior to the experiments, we used X-ray computer…
Approximately half of the existing winged-insect species are of very small size (wing length about 0.3-4 mm); they are referred to as miniature insects. Yet until recently, much of what we know about the mechanics of insect flight was…
Several species of plants have raindrop-sized flowers that catch raindrops opportunistically in order to spread their 0.3-mm seeds distances of over 1 m. In the following fluid dynamics video, we show examples of these plants and some of…