Fluid mechanics visualization links.



Today, some video links.

You'd think the world would be full of fluid mechanics videos. There are so many beautiful, fascinating phenomena to record. But it's not so easy to capture them.

And even harder to get somebody to pay you to do it. And rare that a good scientist with an artist's eye has the skills to film these things or can find a practical collaborator who does.

And funding.

Of course we have some nice work on our website, and a DVD. And I hope to get funding to make much more. Did I mention money?

For still images and methods, a book I've enjoyed: A gallery of fluid motion by Samimy et al. If you follow this link to Amazon.com you'll see some others listed--I'm not familiar with them but they look interesting. And I've blogged about Schlieren & Shadowgraph Techniques.

These books and much of the visualization out there focus on phenomenon and realms (e.g. non-Newtonian fluids, and wild things like this) not so relevant to those of us who study rivers and their biota. And sediment is shown either in very narrowly-controlled situations or not at all. This is one reason why I shot quite a few videos of simple hydraulic structures interacting with sediment for our last DVD.

Today I learned (from Kyle Strom at the Univ. of Houston) about Ascher Shapiro and the National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films (NCFMF) he founded in 1961. MIT hosts many videos (unfortunately in RealMedia format) from that project.

The efluids video gallery has some beautiful video, mostly focused on the esoterica of fluid mechanics (to me, anyway). This site has a wonderful gallery of stills here.

And here you'll find the "sediment transport movies" website hosted by Paul Heller at the University of Wyoming.

My current favorite YouTube channel (I've heard YouTube is blocked for many government employees, sorry) is produced by Dawn Sumner at UC-Davis. Dawn has posted a great collection of videos on sedimentology and fluvial geomorphology, including some good fluid mechanics topics.

And here you'll find my YouTube channel, here my YouTube sediment transport playlist, and finally, my fluid mechanics playlist.
(Fish from a video still, River Geomorphology Videos DVD (by me); second from efluids.com: Brethouwer (2000) Mixing of passive and reactive scalars in turbulent flows: A numerical study. Ph.D. dissertation, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.)

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