Spreading of Normal Liquid Helium Drops.

We have used video imaging and interferometric techniques to investigate the dynamics of spreading of drops of ^{4}He on a solid surface for temperatures ranging from 5.2 K (near the critical point) to 2.2 K (near T_{λ}). After an initial transient, the drops become pancake-shaped with a radius that grows as R(t)≈t^{α}, with α=0.149±0.002. The drops eventually begin to shrink due to evaporation driven by gravitational and curvature effects, which limits their lifetime to about 1000 s. Although helium completely wets the substrate, and the spreading takes place over a pre-existing adsorbed film, a distinct contact line with a contact angle of order one degree is visible throughout this process.

Tomographic Particle Image Velocimetry using Smartphones and Colored Shadows.

We demonstrate the viability of using four low-cost smartphone cameras to perform Tomographic PIV. We use colored shadows to imprint two or three different time-steps on the same image. The back-lighting is accomplished with three sets of differently-colored pulsed LEDs. Each set of Red, Green & Blue LEDs is shone on a diffuser screen facing each of the cameras. We thereby record the RGB-colored shadows of opaque suspended particles, rather than the conventionally used scattered light. We subsequently separate the RGB color channels, to represent the separate times, with preprocessing to minimize noise and cross-talk. We use commercially available Tomo-PIV software for the calibration, 3-D particle reconstruction and particle-field correlations, to obtain all three velocity components in a volume. Acceleration estimations can be done thanks to the triple pulse illumination. Our test flow is a vortex ring produced by forcing flow through a circular orifice, using a flexible membrane, which is driven by a pressurized air pulse. Our system is compared to a commercial stereoscopic PIV system for error estimations. We believe this proof of concept experiment will make this technique available for education, industry and scientists for a fraction of the hardware cost needed for traditional Tomo-PIV.

Self-determined shapes and velocities of giant near-zero drag gas cavities.

Minimizing the retarding force on a solid moving in liquid is the canonical problem in the quest for energy saving by friction and drag reduction. For an ideal object that cannot sustain any shear stress on its surface, theory predicts that drag force will fall to zero as its speed becomes large. However, experimental verification of this prediction has been challenging. We report the construction of a class of self-determined streamlined structures with this free-slip surface, made up of a teardrop-shaped giant gas cavity that completely encloses a metal sphere. This stable gas cavity is formed around the sphere as it plunges at a sufficiently high speed into the liquid in a deep tank, provided that the sphere is either heated initially to above the Leidenfrost temperature of the liquid or rendered superhydrophobic in water at room temperature. These sphere-in-cavity structures have residual drag coefficients that are typically less than [Formula: see text] those of solid objects of the same dimensions, which indicates that they experienced very small drag forces. The self-determined shapes of the gas cavities are shown to be consistent with the Bernoulli equation of potential flow applied on the cavity surface. The cavity fall velocity is not arbitrary but is uniquely predicted by the sphere density and cavity volume, so larger cavities have higher characteristic velocities.