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Bang But No Splash
BishopBerkeley writes "When a drop of ethanol is dropped on a surface at low pressures (1/5 atmosphere or less), it makes no splash. Science offers a brief synopsis and fascinating pictures of the phenomenon. The results seem to confirm the (perhaps counterintuitive) prediction that more viscous liquids are more likely to splash, not less likely . Links to the researchers' home page at U of Chicago (as of now, the site is timing out) and pdf version of the article on arxiv can be found on the Science page also."
The PDF has the pictures. I wish people wouldn't link redundant urls.
Click here to see.
Meh.
Sucking Away the Splatter
LOS ANGELES--Nature may abhor a vacuum, but a vacuum abhors a mess. In the absence of air, a droplet of liquid can crash into a smooth surface without splattering, physicists report. The odd phenomenon might be useful for controlling droplet formation in technological processes like inkjet printing.
Splashdown. A drop of ethanol hits a smooth glass at atmospheric pressure (above) and 1/5 atmospheric pressure (below).
CREDIT: Lei Xu et al./The University of Chicago
It seems obvious and inevitable that a fast-moving droplet will splatter when it hits a hard surface. Researchers have studied the distribution of droplet sizes and energies in such splashes, and physicists Lei Xu, Sidney Nagel, and colleagues at the University of Chicago were searching for ways to control those sizes and energies when they discovered something unexpected: By pumping away some of the surrounding air they could eliminate the splatter entirely.
Within a tall vacuum chamber, the researchers released droplets of alcohol onto a dry glass plate from heights ranging from 20 centimeters to 3 meters. They recorded the resulting splashes with a high speed video camera as they varied the pressure in their apparatus, sucking it down as low as one hundredth of atmospheric pressure. The droplets struck the surface with speeds ranging from 2 to 7 meters per second, and for a given speed, the researchers found they could eliminate the splash by lowering the pressure beyond a specific threshold.
The team explains the results with a simple theory. As a drop strikes a surface, liquid begins to spread sideways at supersonic speed, creating a shockwave. The shockwave pushes back on the liquid, and if that force is greater than the internal forces holding the drop together, the shockwave will lift the liquid off the surface and create a splash. Reducing the pressure reduces the force exerted by the shock wave.
Ironically, the theory predicts that a thicker liquid should splash more than a thinner one. The researchers tested this curious prediction by studying the splash made by three types of alcohol with different viscosities. Indeed, the more viscous the alcohol, the lower the pressure needed to prevent splashing, the team reported here this week at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
"It's not uncommon to see a lovely phenomenon, but it is uncommon to get all the factors straight," says Walter Goldburg, an experimenter at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Bulbul Chakraborty, a theoretical physicist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, says the researchers' analysis opens the way to controlling splashing in, for example, spray coating surfaces with various substances.
To follow up on your follow-up, water is hard to splash because it's a polar molecule. There's a slight positive charge off to one side and a slight negative charge off to the other. Hence, the molecules of water tend to attract each other. They also attract lots of other stuff, which is why water is so great as a solvent, why you get a meniscus at the top of a test tube, why rain droplets form nice round bubbles on the surface of your car, etcetera.
Sometimes in science I tend to get caught up with the complex math and theory, and forget the basic stuff. Water is a truly fascinating material, and can give us a lot of insight into the workings of the world.
uh. surface tension and viscosity are NOT the same thing.
This was discussed in Science News (or maybe elsewhere) some time back so I'm working from memory. One of the things reseachers noted was that air was crucial for splashing. It's rather intuitive in a way. All of the momentum is downward, then converted to radially outward. What makes it go up? The leading edge of the droplet is rushing outward. With the right speed and gas pressure, it splashes up like popping the hood of your car while going down the highway. Get rid of the speed or the gas and it will stay low.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I was curious enough about what you said to do some further research. I found the following:
Protein denatures as you beat it up with the whisk Fat globules are dispersed into smaller and smaller droplets as well,,,hey, how would you like to be whipped with sharp slicing pieces of metal?????? All the while, water is swirling and moving creating eddies of air like a sunami in your bowl Sugar is looking for a safe place to land in all the confusion.... End Result: Uncoiled protein (denaturation) surrounds the air bubbles Sugar lands on the denatured protein and holds on for dear life Fat surrounds the sugar, protein and air bubble, trapping the water Now multiply this scene by about 2 zillion K-billion times You have created an interlaced 3-dimesnional net we call a foam (remember our dispersion chart???? Foam is a gas dispersed in a liquid.....air trapped in milk)
So you wouldn't be able to get the milk to turn into whipped cream which turns into butter without the air for the fat, protein, and sugar to cling to. So this is why the milk is shipped in a vacuum.
Full text: http://www2.muw.edu/~jfitzger/page81.html