Journal
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICS
Volume 79, Issue 3, Pages 267-273Publisher
AMER ASSOC PHYSICS TEACHERS AMER INST PHYSICS
DOI: 10.1119/1.3536647
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Funding
- U.S. National Science Foundation [DMR-0906245]
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Much of the drama and complexity of fluid flow occurs because its governing equations lack unique solutions. The observed behavior depends on the stability of the multitude of solutions, which can change with the experimental parameters. Instabilities cause sudden global shifts in behavior. We have developed a low-cost experiment to study a classical fluid instability. By using an electromagnetic technique, students drive Kolmogorov flow in a thin fluid layer and measure it quantitatively with a webcam. They extract positions and velocities from movies of the flow using Lagrangian particle tracking and compare their measurements to several theoretical predictions, including the effect of the drive current, the spatial structure of the flow, and the parameters at which instability occurs. The experiment can be tailored to undergraduates at any level or to graduate students by appropriate emphasis on the physical phenomena and the sophisticated mathematics that govern them. (C) 2011 American Association of Physics Teachers. [DOI: 10.1119/1.3536647]
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