EXPERIMENTING WITH FLUIDS Winter 2008
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

Room 107 Ocean Sciences Building, School of Oceanography

P.B.Rhines 543-0593, cell 360-643-0740 web
E.G.Lindahl 543-2515
R.Koon 543-2515

Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert)

Focus the Nation: Thursday 31 Jan....attend as many of these events as you can...free snacks and coffee will be one reward (and there will hopefully be others)! depts.washingon.edu/focus

Water has a more extensive molecular structure than previously thought: see UW Annual Faculty Lecture: Gerald Pollack on Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views from the Water's Edge 7.00pm Weds. 30 Jan, 130 Kane Hall ...see this link

• course announcement poster
  
• Handout #0: introduction and list of possible experimental projects.
  
• Handout #1: properties of fluids and hydrostatic balance.
  
• Handout #2: Scaling and fluid dynamics that goes with it (revised twice! since paper copy handed out).
  
• Handout #3: Flow visualization: greatly expanded version (several times) since the paper handout.
  
• Handout #4: Writing your final project report revised 28ii08.

Students:

• Jordan Allen-Flowers, AMath.. internal gravity waves optical visualization and mean-flow generation
• Maggie Avener, CEE.. a tidally pumped river plume entering the ocean, imaging with optical altimetry
• Joey Duncan, AA.. vortex dynamics near a free water surface and vortex line dynamics with Earth's rotation
• Vivian Leung, ESS.. flow and sediment movement in a river blocked by a porous logjam
• Hallie Torrey, AMath.. summer and winter beach building and erosion by surf, and wave pumping of porous flow in the sand
• Yeping Yuan, CEE.. two rivers entering the ocean: interaction of plumes
• Eleanor Williams, Ocean.. baroclinic fronts at a ridge separating Arctic and subpolar basins
  
  LINKS
  • GFD lab, UW: www.ocean.washington.edu/research/gfd.
    
  • fluid lab Wiki run by GFD lab: gfd.washington.edu/wiki.
    
  • Fluid Mechanics Film Series streaming videos at MIT: web.mit.edu/fluids/www/Shapiro/ncfmf.html or Google 'fluid films mit'.
  • fluid image gallery from University of Iowa.
  • short videos from American Physical Society annual meetings 2004
    2005...look for the jellyfish
    2006
    2007
  • American Physical Society fluid dynamics image gallery here.
  • More images and videos on mixing and stirring in fluids by Andre Bakker.
  • Arduino board website www.arduino.cc.
  
  
  

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  glass spheres coated with fluorescein make perfect vertical dye lines which then trace the swirling entrainment of this jet (the jet flows downward at the center of the image)

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  long strings of yarn showing flow round an obstacle in the water channel (the re-entrant flume).

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  combination of mountain induced gravity waves and shear instability
  

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  frontal instability of a dense water mass in a rotating basin (with a cylindrical mountain), seen from above

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  vortex ring formation with a free surface (left: optical deformation of a grid placed beneath the tank; right: sunlit image)

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  This series of pictures (taken with an obviously non-stationary camera) shows the flow through sediment as driven by a "winter" wave. The line of dark sand verifies a guess that the sand, over a relatively short time period, does not move. This line also shows how the flow -- or perhaps the dye -- is affected by a different type of sediment. (The dark sand was much finer than the rest.) Though it cannot be shown by the pictures, it is interesting to note that the flow of the fluid through the sediment is not oscillatory like the waves that drive the motion, but instead seems almost constant along the flow lines.

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  river source flow

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  dye deformation on an internal surface of constant density with internal gravity waves

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  convective 'tornados' in the river plume experiment on the rotating table (click to enlarge)

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  Leonardo daVinci's Studies of water passing obstacles and falling, circa 1508-09.
  
  Flow vizualization
  
  fluorescein dye line wrapped up by a vortex (the line is 'injected' by dropping a glass sphere coated with dye, which is initially vertical and straight)
  
  Time exposure phototgraphy for internal waves in a uniformly stratified fluid (yet with a mixed layer at the top; J.Renwick, GFD projects course).