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Vibration overcomes gravity on a levitating fluid

Volumes of fluid have previously been made to float above air by vibrating the air–fluid system vertically. It now emerges that an ‘antigravity’ effect enables objects to float upside down on the air–fluid interface.
  1. Vladislav Sorokin

    1. Vladislav Sorokin is in the Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.

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  2. Iliya I. Blekhman

    1. Iliya I. Blekhman is at the Institute of Problems in Mechanical Engineering, Russian Academy of Science, St Petersburg 199178, Russia.

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Counter-intuitive phenomena that arise in fluids under the action of vibration have attracted considerable research interest since the 1950s. For example, in a vibrating volume of fluid, gas bubbles can sink and heavy particles can rise1–3. Moreover, a layer of fluid can be levitated above a layer of air by shaking the system vertically at a relatively high frequency (of the order of 100 hertz or more)4. Writing in Nature, Apffel et al.5 report another remarkable phenomenon associated with a vibrating, levitated layer of fluid: objects can float upside down on the lower interface of the fluid, as if gravity were inverted (Fig. 1). These phenomena have strong potential for practical use3, for example in systems that involve gas bubbles suspended in fluids (such as bubble column reactors used for gas–liquid reactions), and for the segregation and transport of material inclusions in fluids (as used in mineral processing and waste-water treatment).

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Nature 585, 31-32 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02451-w

References

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