Art and Science: Flow Paths

Butterfly.

I’ve been helping my wife model the fluid flow through her apparatus, and she has some really neat results from some experiments where two chemicals react and block off the regular, symmetrical flow.

The streamlines look a bit like butterfly wings to me, so I modified the image a little. The original flow paths through the circular apparatus are below. I’m not sure which image I like better.

Flow paths through a circular cell. Mineral precipitates (not shown) are blocking flow through the middle.

P.S. The other thing I learned from this little exercise is how to write Scalable Vector Graphics (svg) files (W3C has an excellent reference). With svg’s, like other vector graphics formats, no matter how big you blow them up you never loose resolution like you would do with a regular, rasterized image. Unfortunately, I still have to figure out how to include the svg files on this blog, so these png images will have to do for now.

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