Contact: Jason Bardi
jbardi@aip.org
301-209-3091
American Institute of Physics

Liquid Acrobatics

Caption: We experiment with injecting a continuous stream of gas into a shallow liquid, similar to how one might blow into a straw placed at the bottom of a near-empty drink. By varying the angle of the straw (here a metal needle), we observe a variety of dynamics, which we film using a high-speed camera. Most noteworthy is an intermediate regime in which cyclical jets erupt from the air-liquid interface and breakup into air-born droplets. These droplets trace out a parabolic trajectory and bounce on the air-liquid interface before eventually coalescing. The shape of each jet, as well as the time between jets, is remarkably similar, and leads to droplets with nearly identical trajectories.

Credit: Video by James C. Bird and Howard A. Stone, Harvard University

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