Tag Archives: shear instabilities

Spin down — lots of shear instabilities in our tank!

Leave a reply

When you stop a rotating tank, lots of stuff happens and it is usually very impressive to watch. Sometimes we stop tanks on purpose to show for example the development of Ekman layers, but sometimes we are just done with an experiment and then get to see cool stuff to see just as part of cleaning up.

Like below: When the tank stops, the water inside continues to spin, but friction with the sides and the bottom of the tank starts slowing the water down, inducing shear. Shear in turn produces turbulence and the structures cause smaller and smaller eddies. Very cool to watch!

Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities

2 Replies

I’m back at my happy place — the teaching lab at GFI in Bergen! :-)

Here a quick look at what we’ve been doing today: Filling the large wave tank! With clear fresh water and then salty pink water that forms a layer below. As the pink water flows underneath the clear water, there is shear between the two layers, waves form and then they break. Beautiful Kelvin-Helmholtz shear instabilities!

Why have we filled the large tank? Just you wait and see… ;-)

Shear flow

Leave a reply

Another early morning crossing this bridge.

IMG_1544And the current and the sun glint were perfect for this kind of photos:IMG_1581They almost look like schlieren photography images in those super old papers, don’t they?
IMG_1587And I find it extremely fascinating how you can see the boundary layer between the flow and the stagnant water, and how wind waves don’t manage to cross that boundary.
IMG_1592See the tiny capillary waves on the right side of the boundary? Those are locally generated because the larger waves on the top left just don’t make it over the strong shear.
IMG_1615

You want to watch a movie? Sure!

And another thing I love on those early morning trips? Being completely alone in a pretty park, with dew on the grass and flowers in the sun :-)
IMG_1631