Observing hydrodynamics on a very large scale
You know I like to point out where you can spot hydrodynamics concepts in your everyday lives (at least if your everyday lives include strolls along rivers and generally a…
Tag: hydrodynamics
Observing hydrodynamic phenomena on a creek
Looking at a creek on a Sunday stroll, and seeing lots and lots of concepts from hydrodynamics class. For example below, you see waves radiating from each of the ducks. And…
Submerged hydraulic jump – observing hydrodynamic phenomena in real life
Hydraulic jumps, especially submerged ones, are a very theoretical concept for many students, one that occurs in a lab experiment if they are lucky, but more likely only seems to…
Waterfalls
You saw the waterfall in my post two days ago already, when I talked about continuity. But now let’s take a closer look. Obviously, it’s artificial, but that makes for…
Continuity
Last week I went to beautiful Lüneburg with a group of climate scientists to continue working on a very exciting project I’ve been involved in over the last year or…
Pressure distribution on a wing
Another neat experiment in the collection I’ve recently been talking about is measuring pressure at different points on a wing profile. It’s not terribly surprising that – as long as…
Pitot tube
Another one of those awesome hydrodynamics toys: A Pitot tube! This is what it looks like: What you can’t see here is the little hole at the tip of the…
Playing with Venturi tubes II
On Monday I posted about playing with Venturi tubes. Guess what: We are going to play more today! Because today the Venturi tubes are connected to a “proper” manometer: Now,…
Playing with Venturi tubes
A Venturi tube is one of the things one hears about in hydrodynamics class all the time, but one never gets to see them for real. And even though I…
Flow direction reversing downstream of obstacle
One of the things that fascinated me most when playing with the huge fan we used to look at the flow downstream of a paddle was how the flow direction reverses.…
Stream lines and paper towels
We’ve been talking about stream lines a lot recently (see for example the flow around a paddle or flow around other stuff). I’ve always heard stories about a neat way of…
Flow around obstacles
We’ve played with the flow around a paddle recently, and you didn’t really believe I stopped there, did you? Of course I didn’t! But I have many many hours of…
Diving ducky and resulting eddies
My sister and I did a little sight-seeing tour in Hamburg the other day, and one of the most fascinating things I saw was — a diving duck. Now, that is…
Ball balancing on air flow
Recently, someone at my university told me about a case of experiments connected to aerodynamics* that they occasionally use for demonstrations and outreach. Obviously, I asked if I might possibly…
Streak lines?
A common problem in hydrodynamics is to distinguish between all the different kinds of lines that characterize a flow field: Stream lines, streak lines, path lines, time lines, and probably…
On vorticity
I’ve promised a long time ago to write a post on vorticity (Hallo Geli! :-)). So here it comes! Vorticity is one of the concepts in oceanography that is often…
Reading the water
As you might know, I really enjoy reading the water – watching the water trying to figure out what processes caused the patterns I see. So here are two more movies…
How can we use interactive flow simulations in teaching of hydrodynamics?
That was quite a teaser on Wednesday, wasn’t it? I said I had the solution to any hydrodynamics problem you might want to illustrate. So here we go: I recently…
Similarity requirements of a hydrodynamic model
Why downscaling only works down to a certain limit When talking about oceanographic tank experiments that are designed to show features of the real ocean, many people hope for tiny…
Marsigli’s experiment
Density-driven flow. The experiment presented in this post was first proposed by Marsigli in 1681. It illustrates how, despite the absence of a difference in the surface height of two fluids,…
Hydraulic jump II
More movies of my kitchen sink. I am really fascinated by the hydraulic jumps in my kitchen sink. I can’t believe I haven’t used this before when I was teaching!…
Hydraulic jumps
Water changing its velocity from above to below the critical velocity. Recently in beautiful Wetzlar: The river Lahn flows through the city below the medieval cathedral at sunset. And I’m…