The Division of Fluid Dynamics exists for the advancement and diffusion of knowledge of the physics of fluids with special emphasis on the dynamical theories of the liquid, plastic and gaseous states of matter under all conditions of temperature and pressure.
Every year, the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics hosts a physical Gallery of Fluid Motion at its annual meeting -- a room where stunning graphics and videos from computational or experimental studies showing flow phenomena are displayed. The most outstanding entries are selected by a panel of referees for artistic content and honored for their originality and ability to convey information. Past winners are published in the journal Physics of Fluids.
The Gallery of Fluid Motion at the 61st APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Annual Meeting, held from November 23-25, 2008 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, highlighted a subset of submitted images and videos prior to the judging process.
Reporters seeking permission to use these images or desiring author contact information should email Jason Bardi.
Not your ordinary splash -- a 2-mm droplet of red dye impacting on a thin layer of milk.
The formation of a water-rich boundary layer near the free surface leads to a buoyancy-induced instability in the form of fingers sinking into the liquid bulk.
In this sequence of images, the collision of a viscoelastic drop (or particle) is observed with a high speed camera.
A miniature explosion initiated within a droplet of 6 mm diameter and sitting on a glass plate leads to the upward ejection of a fast liquid jet. The explosion generated with a pulsed laser creates an expanding and then shrinking bubble.
These droplet-decorated streams are observed through the glass of a diverging microchannel.
The jet wake produced by the salp, Cyclosalpa affinis, a common gelatinous organisms in oceanic waters. They swim by jet propulsion, drawing water through incurrent (oral) and excurrent (atrial) siphons at opposite ends of the body.
The miscible interface of a ferrofluid droplet under the influence of a vertical magnetic field.
Overlaid images of a sphere entraining dyed corn syrup as it passes through the density transition in a strong, stable stratification of miscible fluids.
These images show results of a computer simulation of two fluid layers flowing across each other in opposite directions. The swirling waves and vortices form due to the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, which is named after two of the scientists that first studied them nearly 150 years ago.
The images show the temporal evolution of a thin fluid layer of sulfur hexafluoride gas embedded in air, after interaction with a shock wave of strength Mach~1.2.
These are pictures of dye inside hexagonal cavities showing the circulating vortices caused by the freestream flow over top of the cavities.
Self-luminous, open-shutter photographs of the re-establishment of detonation waves in a thin channel downstream of cylinder rows. The onset of detonation is marked by the appearance of a fish scale cellular pattern.
Color-coded velocity field snapshot of C. elegans swimming in water. The length and radius of the C. elegans are approximately 1 mm and 100 nm, respectively.
The vortex structure around a sinusoidally undulating ribbon fin of a weakly electric fish. A series of organized vortex rings creates a jet that propels the fish.
View of a frying pan filled with a thin layer of egg whites. Thermal convection in the fluid competes with coagulation of the egg albumen to create a fingering pattern propagating into the convection cells.
When fluid flows over a wing or over a flat-plate, quite often the state of the flow transitions from regular (laminar) to chaotic (turbulent).