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RE: experiments in 2-D hydrodynamics




Sam Held wrote:

Harry,
I believe it is very thin liquid that happens to border two
systems of different pressures. In fact, I just read a report in the APS
News "paper" about a talk at the Spring APS meeting in Columbus where a
professor was using bubles to run experiments in 2-D hydrodynamics. I can
dig it up for more details if you wish.If you know about any reference of these experiments, I would be interested as well

These experiments were done by Maarten Rutgers who has just been hired by Ohio
State. He recently gave a fantastic talk about them to our department at
Kenyon. He takes a bottle of soap solution and hangs it from a height with two
nylon threads coming out the bottom. The soap is induced to form a film between
the two threads and falls under the influence of gravity (at a constant rate
due to the damping effects of air resistance.) Thus he has a 2-D "wind tunnel".
He inserts objects in the flow, say a cylinder, and the variations of film
thickness allow him to visualize the resulting flow. His van Karman Street
vortices are quite lovely, for example.

For a nice explanation, see his web page at :

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~maarten/work/soapflow/soapintro/basicsoap.html

Tim Sullivan
sullivan@kenyon.edu