Related papers: The (not so simple!) chain fountain

A sudden vertical impact on the mouth of a beer bottle generates a compression wave that propagates through the glass towards the bottom. When this wave reaches the base of the bottle, it is transmitted to the liquid as an expansion wave…

The presence of a very small amount of high molecular weight polymer significantly delays the pinch-off singularity of a drop of water falling from a faucet, and leads to the formation of a long-lived cylindrical filament. In this paper we…

The inverse Magnus effect is a phenomenon in which a spinning sphere experiences a lift force opposite to the conventional Magnus effect. This effect is typically observed in the flow higher than a critical Reynolds number or spin ratio. We…

Two oppositely charged droplets of (say) water in e.g. oil or air will tend to drift together under the influence of their charges. As they make contact, one might expect them to coalesce and form one large droplet, and this indeed happens…

Experimental observation of a new mechanism of sandpile formation is reported. As a steady stream of dry sand is poured onto a horizontal surface, a pile forms which has a thin river of sand on one side flowing from the apex of the pile to…

Cavitation is a general phenomenon of the fluid flows with obstacles. It appears in the cooling conduits of the fast nuclear engines. A model of this phenomenon using the theory of Laplace and a common non-convex energy for the liquid and…

Cluster concepts have been extremely useful in elucidating many problems in physics. Percolation theory provides a generic framework to study the behavior of the cluster distribution. In most cases the theory predicts a geometrical…

A high-speed jet flowing inside of a partially-open hydraulic valve is accompanied by a reaction force, also referred to as flow force. The nature of this force has remained a mystery despite an extensive research effort spanning many…

When drinking a cup of coffee under the morning sunshine, you may notice white membranes of steam floating on the surface of the hot water. They stay notably close to the surface and appear to almost stick to it. Although the membranes…

Cavitation is a phenomenon in which bubbles form and collapse in liquids due to pressure or temperature changes. Even common tools like a rubber popper can be used to create cavitation at home. As a rubber popper toy slams a solid wall…

For more than a century, the consensus has been that the thin-film hydraulic jump that can be seen in kitchen sinks is created by gravity. However, we recently reported that these jumps are created by surface tension, and gravity does not…

To understand the mechanics of a complex fluid such as a foam we propose a model experiment (a bidimensional flow around an obstacle) for which an external sollicitation is applied, and a local response is measured, simultaneously. We…

This fluid dynamics video is an entry for the Gallery of Fluid Motion for the 66th Annual Meeting of the Fluid Dynamics Division of the American Physical Society. We show the curious behaviour of a light ball interacting with a liquid jet.…

In 2007 an interesting phenomenon was discovered: a thread of water, the so-called water bridge (WB), can hang between two glass beakers filled with deionized water if voltage is applied to them. We analyze the available explanations of the…

A vertical connection of water is formed when a high voltage electrode is dipped in and pulled out of a container of deionized water. We considered the formation and dynamical characteristics of this vertical water bridge. For the first…

The flow of granular material through an orifice is studied experimentally as a function of force $F$ pushing the flow. It is found that the flow rate increases linearly with $F$ -- a new, unexpected result that is in contrast to the usual…

A synthetic fluid dynamo built in the spirit of the Bullard device [E. C. Bullard, Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 51, 744 (1955)] is investigated. It is a two-step dynamo in which one process stems from the fluid turbulence, while the other part…

It is well-known that water in both liquid and vapor phases exhibits exceptionally weak absorption of light in the visible range. Recent experiments, however, have demonstrated that at the liquid-air interface, absorption in the visible…

This paper describes a study of the generation of a plughole vortex and its consequences in a drainpipe during drainage of water from a stationary rectangular tank. The critical and minimum depths of water above the inlet of the drainpipe,…

Turbulence is ever produced in the low-viscosity/large-scale fluid flows by the velocity shears and, in unstable stratification, by buoyancy forces. It is commonly believed that both mechanisms produce the same type of chaotic motions,…