Fluid dynamics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Editorial |

    Many advances in biological physics result from multidisciplinary collaborations. We celebrate the physics of life with a collection of articles that offer insight into successful interactions between researchers from different fields.

  • Comment |

    Fluid flows play a key part in living systems. Cross-disciplinary engagement between fluid physics and biology greatly benefits both fields.

    • Kirsty Y. Wan

  • News & Views |

    • Bart Verberck

  • Research Briefing |

    Drops sitting on an array of parallel fibres spontaneously move along the fibres when subject to an airflow perpendicular to the array. The drops show long-range aerodynamic interactions with their downstream and upstream neighbours, and these can catalyse drop coalescence and removal of drops from the fibres — relevant for applications such as fog harvesting and filtration.

  • Article |

    The wetting behaviour of drops attached to fibres is exploited in many applications including fog harvesting. The presence of a background air flow on fibre-attached drops on parallel fibres is now shown to lead to alignment, repulsion and coalescence processes.

    • Jessica L. Wilson
    • , Amir A. Pahlavan
    •  & Howard A. Stone

  • Article |

    Active matter exhibits positional coherence in addition to the well-known orientational order. It is now shown that coherent structures in active nematics—made of dynamical attractors and repellers—form, move and deform, steered by topological defects.

    • Mattia Serra
    • , Linnea Lemma
    •  & L. Mahadevan

  • Research Briefing |

    Repeated firing of vortex rings into a water tank is shown to create an isolated blob of confined turbulence — perfect for studying the nature of turbulence and its interface with quiescence. Moreover, using coherent vortex rings to feed the turbulence allows the controlled injection of conserved quantities such as helicity.

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Elastoviscoplastic fluids combine solid- and liquid-like behaviour depending on applied stress. Simulations of elastoviscoplastic fluids at high Reynolds number now show that plasticity plays a key role in the turbulent flows seen in these systems, leading for example to intermittency.

    • Mohamed S. Abdelgawad
    • , Ianto Cannon
    •  & Marco E. Rosti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quantum turbulence typically entails reconnecting quantized vortices as seen in quantum fluids. Experiments with superfluid helium now show turbulent dynamics with negligible vortex reconnection, a regime dominated by interacting vortex waves at all length scales.

    • J. T. Mäkinen
    • , S. Autti
    •  & V. B. Eltsov

  • News & Views |

    Oil-coated bubbles bursting across interfaces enhance aerosol formation and transmission by producing jets that are smaller and faster than those formed by pristine bubbles.

    • Samantha A. McBride

  • Article |

    A bursting bubble produces a jet drop previously estimated to be too large to contribute to aerosolization. Oil-coated bubbles produce fast and thin jets, which break up into much smaller drops with potential implications for airborne transmission.

    • Zhengyu Yang
    • , Bingqiang Ji
    •  & Jie Feng

  • News & Views |

    Phase-change processes, such as condensation or freezing, are known to compromise a surface’s water-repelling capability. It now turns out that tuning the freezing conditions can enable the spontaneous expulsion of water droplets.

    • Jonathan B. Boreyko

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Icephobic surfaces are helpful for increasing safety and sustainability in engineering applications. A study of the behaviour of supercooled droplets freezing on superhydrophobic surfaces now provides insights into ice-repellency mechanisms.

    • Henry Lambley
    • , Gustav Graeber
    •  & Dimos Poulikakos

  • Article |

    The concept of quasiparticles helps to describe various quantum phenomena in solids. It is now shown that certain properties of a classical system of hydrodynamically interacting particles can also be described by means of quasiparticles.

    • Imran Saeed
    • , Hyuk Kyu Pak
    •  & Tsvi Tlusty

  • Comment |

    An analysis of representations of fluid flows in classical paintings reveals scientific inaccuracies. Some of these misrepresentations might be caused by a limited understanding of fluid dynamics and others by deliberate artistic choices.

    • Rouslan Krechetnikov

  • Research Briefing |

    The formation of bubbles at liquid–liquid interfaces is challenging to explain because gas pockets cannot be stabilized by cracks on solid impurities. Experiments show that a difference in the gas solubilities of two immiscible liquids provides a gas reservoir, which allows gas to accumulate at the interface, leading to bubble formation.

  • Letter |

    Cavitation refers to the emergence of bubbles from liquids undergoing pressure reduction. A hitherto unknown cavitation scenario is now reported, with bubbles originating from the atomically smooth interface between two immiscible liquids.

    • Patricia Pfeiffer
    • , Meysam Shahrooz
    •  & Claus-Dieter Ohl

  • Comment |

    Fluid simulations today are remarkably realistic. In this Comment I discuss some of the most striking results from the past 20 years of computer graphics research that made this happen.

    • Károly Zsolnai-Fehér

  • Article |

    Fractons are particles that can only move in tandem, which substantially affects their thermalization. Below four spatial dimensions, an unconventional dynamical universality class can emerge as thermal fluctuations destroy hydrodynamic behaviour.

    • Paolo Glorioso
    • , Jinkang Guo
    •  & Andrew Lucas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The sliding of a water drop on a surface is traditionally described by taking flow within the drop and contact-line friction into account. Now, evidence shows that electric forces can also substantially affect water-on-surface sliding dynamics.

    • Xiaomei Li
    • , Pravash Bista
    •  & Hans-Jürgen Butt

  • News & Views |

    • Bart Verberck

  • News & Views |

    The atmospheres of most planets in our Solar System have a single large cyclonic vortex at each of their poles. Jupiter with its polygonal cyclones surrounding a single one, however, falls out of line, owing to an energy transfer to larger scales.

    • Agustín Sánchez-Lavega

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Infrared images of Jupiter taken by the Juno spacecraft reveal an energy transfer driven by moist convection. This mechanism is expected to enhance heat transfer, which might also be relevant to Earth’s atmosphere.

    • Lia Siegelman
    • , Patrice Klein
    •  & Giuseppe Sindoni

  • News & Views |

    Active matter can have macroscopic properties that defy the usual laws of hydrodynamics. Now these tell-tale properties have been traced down to the non-equilibrium character and handedness of interactions between individual particles.

    • Patrick Pietzonka

  • Article |

    Active fluids exhibit properties reminiscent of equilibrium systems when their degrees of freedom are statistically decoupled. A theory for the fluctuating hydrodynamics of these fluids offers a probe of their anomalous transport coefficients.

    • Ming Han
    • , Michel Fruchart
    •  & Vincenzo Vitelli

  • Letter |

    Microswimmers tend to accumulate in regions where their speed is significantly reduced, but experimental and numerical evidence now points towards a viscophobic turning mechanism that biases certain microalgae away from high-viscosity areas.

    • Michael R. Stehnach
    • , Nicolas Waisbord
    •  & Jeffrey S. Guasto

  • Letter |

    Bacteria live in heterogeneous environments, so it is important to investigate their behaviour in porous media. Here the authors show that flow disorder enhances the effect of chemical gradients in micropockets in a porous medium, which then aid the transport of bacteria.

    • Pietro de Anna
    • , Amir A. Pahlavan
    •  & Ruben Juanes

  • Article |

    Acoustic waves that carry orbital angular momentum are amplified as they pass through an absorbing disk when the rotation rate exceeds the frequency of the incident wave, thus providing an experimental demonstration of Zel’dovich amplification.

    • Marion Cromb
    • , Graham M. Gibson
    •  & Daniele Faccio

  • Measure for Measure |

    Watching the ocean’s ebb and flow may be soothing, but the history of the sverdrup unit for ocean flow is more turbulent. Tor Eldevik and Peter Mosby Haugan recount an oceanographic journey reaching high tide with Harald Ulrik Sverdrup and his unit.

    • Tor Eldevik
    •  & Peter Mosby Haugan

  • Article |

    Determining the properties that emerge from the equations that govern turbulent flow is a fundamental challenge in non-equilibrium physics. A hydrodynamic theory for two-dimensional active nematic fluids at vanishing Reynolds number is now put forward, revealing a universal scaling behaviour for this class of systems.

    • Ricard Alert
    • , Jean-François Joanny
    •  & Jaume Casademunt

  • Article |

    Experiments on the deformation and bursting of elastic capsules impacting rigid walls are reported, revealing an analogy to the impact of liquid drops. The developed model for macroscopic objects could potentially be expanded to microscopic scales.

    • Etienne Jambon-Puillet
    • , Trevor J. Jones
    •  & P.-T. Brun

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