Fluid videos make a big ‘bounce-splash’

By Hamish Johnston

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you dropped a sphere of jelly on floor?

The answer to this and other pressing questions in fluid dynamics have appeared on the arXiv preprint server as a series of videos that have been submitted to the Gallery of Fluid Motion — part of next month’s American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting .

In the movie I watched, drops of “viscoelastic” material — mixtures of gelatin and water — pancake onto the floor before rising phoenix-like back into the air.

But instead of coming back as a sphere, the jelly rises as a slowly-vibrating dumbell.

This particular video was posted by Federico Hernandez-Sanchez and colleagues at the National University of Mexico and you can read about their experiment here — where you can also link to their videos.

Other papers linking to videos include Dynamics of Water Entry, The Clapping Book, and Liquid Acrobatics .