Motor Made From Liquid Film

KentuckyFC writes "Last year, a group of Iranian physicists made a puzzling discovery. They placed a thin film of water in a small cell and bathed it in two perpendicular electric fields. To their surprise this caused the water to rotate. They called their device a liquid film motor and posted on the web a cool set of movies showing the phenomenon. The puzzle is this: the electric fields are static, so what's driving the motor? Now another group of physicists has the answer: a complex interaction between the electric field, the cell container and the liquid causes water to move along the cell wall. Crucially, it moves in opposite directions on opposite sides of the cell and so sets up a circular flow. The phenomenon works only when friction and surface tension are significant forces so the effect is entirely scale dependent. That's probably why we haven't seen it before and also why it could have important implications for microfluidic devices such as lab-on-a-chip."

Comments

This is an act of war!!!

[alta]

By posting links to MOVIES hosted in IRAN you have used the /. effect to saturate that entire country's available bandwidth. This is terrorism sponsored by the capitalist west! You have fired the first shot, but I ran WILL retaliate. You knew we had nukes, now we will prove it to the doubters. Kiss your precious Israel goodbye!

It'll take us a while to get the nukes into launch position though. The servos are these really cool little motors made out of water and electricity. They have to be really small, so we have a whole lot of them working together.

Re:Where does the energy come from ?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the will of Allah, you insensitive infidel.