Colorful Fluid Dynamics

Video by Sherry Bian/University of Michigan

It was time to update my blog and I figured I would post something that isn't the Olympics (though there is more coming from on them...still awesome). After getting an email about a website that stories videos of fluid flows I got thinking of Sherry's great video of a driven cavity flow. This video really is pretty and scores one for experimental fluid mechanics. To date the pretty pictures and videos have been completely dominated by the computational fluid dynamics community, but Sherry scored one for us experimental folks. Above is the video and below is a picture to help explain what is going on in the video. Basically in the picture below everything that is white is water (that is slowly getting faster and faster in the video) and the non-white is Sherry's model that is not moving.