hydrodynamics – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Observing hydrodynamics on a very large scale

mglessmer — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:09:34 +0000

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 lot of water) A while back we went to Geesthacht. We were hoping for more ice on the Elbe river, but sadly there was none. […]

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Observing hydrodynamic phenomena on a creek

mglessmer — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 11:48:29 +0000

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 you see interference of waves from all those ducks. What happens if the ducks bring their waves closer? At some point, all those waves from […]

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Submerged hydraulic jump – observing hydrodynamic phenomena in real life

mglessmer — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 09:06:56 +0000

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 exists in videos, drawings, and text books. But we can observe them all the time if we know what we are looking for! They don’t only […]

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Waterfalls

mglessmer — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 09:45:10 +0000

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 really pretty symmetric flow patterns:

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Continuity

mglessmer — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 09:21:05 +0000

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 so (see “scales in the climate system” funded by CliSAP here). I so enjoyed being with a group of people who talk about converging solutions of […]

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Pressure distribution on a wing

mglessmer — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 09:55:54 +0000

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 the wing is oriented in the correct way in the flow – pressure is high below the wing and low above it. Kinda the whole […]

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Pitot tube

mglessmer — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 09:37:48 +0000

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 tube that is pointing downwards in the picture. What the Pitot tube measures is the pressure difference between that hole (the stagnation pressure since it’s […]

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Playing with Venturi tubes II

mglessmer — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 09:57:50 +0000

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, if I wasn’t so lazy this would be a great opportunity to get good readings of the pressure differences caused by different flow rates. However, […]

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Playing with Venturi tubes

mglessmer — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 09:35:40 +0000

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 just said on Friday that the thing that I found most fascinating in the aerodynamics collection I got to borrow recently was to see how […]

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Flow direction reversing downstream of obstacle

mglessmer — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 09:18:03 +0000

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. Unfortunately (alas, it was to be expected) we didn’t really see this on the paper towel stream line test I did the other day. But […]

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