Tag Archives: vortex street
Vortex street
Do you use a tide chart to find the best time for your Saturday walk, too?
I showed you a vortex street on a plate formed by pulling a paint brush through sugary water as an example. Now today I want to show you the real thing: Instead of stagnant water and a moving object, I bring to you the flowing Elbe river and a bollard!
Watch how vortices with alternating spin are shed every three or four seconds!
Vortex streets on a plate
You might think that three hours of canoe polo on a Saturday morning would be enough water for the day, but no. As when I did the experiment for the “eddies in a jar” post a while back, sometimes I just need to do some cool oceanography. So last Saturday, this is what I did:
I took a plate, mixed some sugar, silvery water color, and water, pulled some stuff through the water and that was pretty much it. As a first order approximation, pulling an object through a stagnant water body is the same as the water body moving past a stationary object. And since it is usually pretty difficult to visualize flow around stationary objects (at least if you don’t want to pollute that little creek nor waste a lot of water). So this is really exciting.
And for those of you who are always like “oh, I would love to, but I couldn’t possibly do this at home!”: This is what it looked like in my kitchen when I filmed the video above:
The plate I am filming is the one underneath the camera (I love my gorilla grippy). My water colors from back when I was in primary school, a paint brush, a chop stick, the plate I tried first that turned out to not have enough contrast with the silver paint, a blanket because the tiles are cold to sit on. Oh, and the flowers that I have been meaning to put into nice pots for a couple of days now. So – no big mystery here! Go try! And let me know how it went.