Fluid dynamics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The complexity of fabricating and operating microfluidic devices limits their use. Walsh et al. describe a method in which circuits are printed as quickly and simply as writing with a pen, and liquids in them are confined by fluid instead of solid walls.

    • Edmond J. Walsh
    • , Alexander Feuerborn
    •  & Peter R. Cook

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Elastic turbulence, a random-in-time flow, can drive efficient mixing in microfluidics. Using a 3D particle tracking method, the authors show that the smoothness assumption breaks at scales far smaller than believed and the ballistic pair dispersion holds over much longer distances than expected.

    • Eldad Afik
    •  & Victor Steinberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hourglasses measure time because the discharge rate of dry sand is constant. Here Koivistoet al. show that when such a system contains water there is a surge in discharge because the fluid drains faster than the grains, which might help us understand the transport of grains in silos.

    • Juha Koivisto
    •  & Douglas J. Durian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Shear thickening characterizes liquid suspensions of particles that reversibly solidify subject to stress. Here, Comtetet al. show that shear thickening occurs at the transition from lubricated contacts to frictional contacts at a single-particle level, which can be linked to the change in macroscopic rheology.

    • Jean Comtet
    • , Guillaume Chatté
    •  & Annie Colin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cavitation is the formation of vapour bubbles within a liquid and is undesirable in many industrial applications. Here Stiegeret al. show how the anisotropic fluids influence this process in a nematic liquid crystal and find that orientational ordering of molecules can tune the onset of cavitation.

    • Tillmann Stieger
    • , Hakam Agha
    •  & Anupam Sengupta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bacteria continuously inject energy into their surroundings and thus induce chaotic like flows, namely meso-scale turbulence. Here, the authors show that transition to meso-scale turbulence and inertial turbulence observed in pipes share the same scaling behavior that belongs to the directed percolation universality class.

    • Amin Doostmohammadi
    • , Tyler N. Shendruk
    •  & Julia M. Yeomans

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Water treatment processes mostly rely on the use of membranes and filters, which have high pumping costs and require periodic replacement. Here, the authors describe an efficient membraneless method that induces directed motion of suspended colloidal particles by exposing the suspension to CO2.

    • Sangwoo Shin
    • , Orest Shardt
    •  & Howard A. Stone

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Active fluids consist of self-driven particles that can drive spontaneous flow without the intervention of external forces. Here Woodhouseet al. show how to design logic circuits using this phenomenon in active fluid networks, which could be further exploited for autonomous microfluidic computing.

    • Francis G. Woodhouse
    •  & Jörn Dunkel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drop evaporation can be used as a fabrication technology for targeted particle deposition or microflow control, yet previous research is limited to spherical drops. Here, Sáenzet al. generalize the evaporation dynamics for arbitrary drop geometry and show its potential for more sophisticated control.

    • P. J. Sáenz
    • , A. W. Wray
    •  & K. Sefiane

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bioaerosols may be generated when bubbles break on the surface of water, but it is unclear if this mechanism works with soil-based microbes. Here, the authors show that soil bacteria may be transferred from the soil surface and dispersed by raindrops.

    • Young Soo Joung
    • , Zhifei Ge
    •  & Cullen R. Buie

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Turbulent mixing next to rough topographic features is believed to be key in the closure of the abyssal ocean circulation. Here, using Southern Ocean data, the authors show that mixing hotspots trap fluid and mix it for long periods, explaining the global impact of relatively few mixing hotspots.

    • A. Mashayek
    • , R. Ferrari
    •  & A. Naveira Garabato

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Targeted delivery of microparticles is desirable for rapid, sensitive biological assays or self-assembly process. Here Daset al. use catalytic reactions on the surface of microfluidic chambers to generate unidirectional flows that carry and deposit microparticles to selective regions of the chamber.

    • Sambeeta Das
    • , Oleg E. Shklyaev
    •  & Ayusman Sen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, Francoiset al. propose a method of remotely shaping particle trajectories by using rotating waves on a liquid gas interface. The superposition of orthogonal standing waves creates angular momentum which is transferred from waves to floating microparticles, guiding them along closed trajectories.

    • N Francois
    • , H Xia
    •  & M Shats

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Internal solitary waves are widespread within oceans, lakes and the atmosphere but their origin is uncertain. Here we show a rare natural case of the birth of internal solitary waves arising from the head of a frontally-forced intrusion as observed in the Saguenay Fjord, Canada.

    • Daniel Bourgault
    • , Peter S. Galbraith
    •  & Cédric Chavanne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large methane hydrates reserves are found in mud volcanoes, but climate change may lead to methane release. Here, the authors show that methane adsorption creates overpressures leading to rapid recirculation of seawater, thus reducing the melting timescales of methane hydrates from millennia to decades.

    • Silvana S. S. Cardoso
    •  & Julyan H. E. Cartwright

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The extensive use of pesticides in agriculture calls for efficient spraying techniques to reduce pollution of soils and groundwater by toxic chemicals. Damak et al. simultaneously spray liquids containing oppositely charged polyelectrolytes that form defects, pinning droplets on targeted surfaces.

    • Maher Damak
    • , Md Nasim Hyder
    •  & Kripa K. Varanasi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dispensing small droplets is essential to many ink printing, chemical and biological technologies, but the conventional orifice-based methods fail when the size of droplets approaches sub-micrometre range. Here, Zhang et al.show dispensing of viscous droplets down to attolitre in a controllable way.

    • Yanzhen Zhang
    • , Benliang Zhu
    •  & Gunther Wittstock

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Coating flows on surfaces are very useful in many industrial applications such as printing organic electronics, but it is challenging to control the process owing to unstable flow. Here, Deblais et al. take advantage of this instability to prepare tunable patterns composed of oriented, well-spaced lines.

    • A. Deblais
    • , R. Harich
    •  & H. Kellay

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Suspensions of particles at high volume fractions are subject to discontinuous shear thickening or even turn into solid upon impact, yet the underlying mechanism remains elusive. Here, Han et al. follow the propagation of shear bands at jamming fronts in three dimensions and show no sign of densification.

    • Endao Han
    • , Ivo R. Peters
    •  & Heinrich M. Jaeger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process giving rise to topology change and energy release in plasmas, of particular relevance for the Sun. Here the authors report the observation of fast reconnection in a solar filament eruption, which occurs between a set of ambient fibrils and the filament itself.

    • Zhike Xue
    • , Xiaoli Yan
    •  & Li Zhao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The control of microswimmers such as bacteria is important for emerging applications of active bioinspired materials. Here, the authors demonstrate the use of vortical shear to expel suspended motile bacteria from the vicinity of a rotating microparticle.

    • Andrey Sokolov
    •  & Igor S. Aranson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many living systems, such as bacterial colonies, exhibit collective and dynamic behaviours that are sensitive to the change in environmental conditions. Here, the authors show that a colloidal active matter system switches between gathering and dispersal of individuals in response to a disordered potential.

    • Erçağ Pinçe
    • , Sabareesh K. P. Velu
    •  & Giorgio Volpe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microfluidic reactors offer cheap and simple solutions for nanoparticle synthesis, but suffer from the variation in particle size due to flow fluctuations. Riche et al. fabricate a device that is robust over a large range of flow rates and enables consistent particle synthesis in parallel operation.

    • Carson T. Riche
    • , Emily J. Roberts
    •  & Noah Malmstadt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flowing granular materials exhibit fluid-like features, but not all of them can be described by extending fluid mechanics. Here, the authors show vortex flow in a granular layer sheared between coaxial cylinders, and attribute it to the effect that the material moves away from the sheared region.

    • K. P. Krishnaraj
    •  & Prabhu R. Nott

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Stone skipping on water is a very classical phenomenon, but the relevant fluid dynamics is more complicated than what is normally expected. Here, Belden et al. study the effect of elasticity on the skipping dynamics and show why soft spheres can skip much easier than solid spheres.

    • Jesse Belden
    • , Randy C. Hurd
    •  & Tadd T. Truscott

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Active matter can be described as either wet or dry, depending on whether hydrodynamics or frictional damping dominates the interactions. Here, the authors show that an increase in friction can stabilise the chaotic flow observed in wet active systems to give an ordered lattice of topological defects.

    • Amin Doostmohammadi
    • , Michael F. Adamer
    •  & Julia M. Yeomans

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ferromagnetism has been known as a material property of solids since the time of the ancient Greeks. Here, Shuai et al. report that magnetic nanoplates suspended in a simple solvent can spontaneously align to form a ferromagnetic liquid, capable of both producing and sensing magnetic fields.

    • M. Shuai
    • , A. Klittnick
    •  & N. A. Clark

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Emulsion droplets have many biotechnological applications, such as parallelized single cell analysis. Here, Gruner et al. introduce the concept of the minimal emulsions in a microfluidic device that allows full control of molecular transport between emulsion droplets.

    • Philipp Gruner
    • , Birte Riechers
    •  & Jean-Christophe Baret

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the local structure of water varies as a function of temperature is a long-studied topic, which is still under debate. Here, the authors show that dielectric susceptibility measurements might be used to probe and identify propagating optical phonon-like modes in the hydrogen-bond network of water.

    • Daniel C. Elton
    •  & Marivi Fernández-Serra

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Water is the most common liquid in nature, with unusual properties that could be linked to the peculiar hydrogen-bonding network holding the molecules together. Here, Nilsson and Pettersson review recent progress in searching the connections between local configurations and thermodynamic responses of water.

    • Anders Nilsson
    •  & Lars G. M. Pettersson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microcavity polaritons are a fluid of coupled photonic and electronic excitations that share many of the properties of Bose–Einstein condensates. Here, the authors show that the sudden creation of these bosonic fluids at high density results in the concentration of the particles, unlike an atomic gas that would expand.

    • L. Dominici
    • , M. Petrov
    •  & D. Sanvitto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Self-propelled colloidal particles can be potentially used to transport cargoes at the microscale, but it is challenging to prevent randomization of their motion by Brownian rotations. Here, Das et al.quench these rotations by solid walls, which guide in-plane swimming without the need for external fields.

    • Sambeeta Das
    • , Astha Garg
    •  & Stephen J. Ebbens

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Designing superhydrophobic surfaces that water does not wet is crucial for many applications ranging from water harvesting to self-cleaning. Here, Liu et al.show how to minimize the contact of liquid drops impacting on solid surfaces with convex and concave macrotextures comparable to the size of drops.

    • Yahua Liu
    • , Matthew Andrew
    •  & Zuankai Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The development of modern flexible electronics calls for new materials with extreme stretchability and high conductivity. Here, Mates et al. show a printable material made of commercially-available elastomers and carbon nanofibres, which exhibits low resistance and water-repellency at strain up to 500%.

    • Joseph E. Mates
    • , Ilker S. Bayer
    •  & Constantine M. Megaridis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brownian motion of biomolecules and colloidal particles near solid walls is expected to be rather different from that in bulk, but the details have been highly controversial. Here, Huang and Szlufarska show a general breakdown of traditional no-slip boundary conditions at short timescales that clarifies the controversy.

    • Kai Huang
    •  & Izabela Szlufarska

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Schooling or flocking of animals in nature is generally explained via an energy optimization approach. Here, Beckeret al. mimic the conditions for an infinite array of swimmers in a water tank and show that fluid dynamic interactions alone are sufficient to lead to coherent and collective locomotion.

    • Alexander D. Becker
    • , Hassan Masoud
    •  & Leif Ristroph

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The structural heterogeneity in liquid water is commonly believed to disappear beyond 50 fs due to the strong intermolecular interaction. Here, the authors show frequency-dependent vibrational relaxation, which indicates the persistence of structural heterogeneity on a picosecond timescale.

    • Sietse T. van der Post
    • , Cho-Shuen Hsieh
    •  & Johannes Hunger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Covalency is a fundamental concept in chemical bonding, but experimentally it is not possible to measure the degree of covalency of a particular bond. Here, the authors report a model to link the covalency of hydrogen bonds in water with the anisotropy of the magnetic shielding tensor in the proton NMR.

    • Hossam Elgabarty
    • , Rustam Z. Khaliullin
    •  & Thomas D. Kühne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding turbulent flows arising from random dispersive waves that interact through nonlinearities is a challenging issue in physics. Here, the authors model and observe experimentally in a nonlinear optics set-up the transition between a sea of small-scale shocklets and a giant collective shock wave.

    • G. Xu
    • , D. Vocke
    •  & A. Picozzi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cooling hot surfaces by boiling water is widely practiced, but the amount of heat transfer is normally constrained by vapour layer formation at sufficiently high temperatures. Here, the authors report the maximum in the critical heat flux on textured hydrophilic surfaces at an intermediate texture density.

    • Navdeep Singh Dhillon
    • , Jacopo Buongiorno
    •  & Kripa K. Varanasi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drop impact on a liquid surface leads to the formation of vortex rings, but this process is still poorly understood due to the lack of effective experimental characterization. Here, Leeet al. visualize the process using ultrafast X-ray phase-contrast imaging and follow the dynamics of vortex rings.

    • Ji San Lee
    • , Su Ji Park
    •  & Jung Ho Je

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Solution printing is a desirable route for manufacturing organic solar cells, whilst the major challenge lies with morphology control. Here, Diao et al.use a microstructured blade to guide the solution flow during printing, which improves polymer crystallization and the resulting device performance.

    • Ying Diao
    • , Yan Zhou
    •  & Zhenan Bao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The behaviour of water impacting on surfaces is crucial to many applications, including anti-icings and self-cleaning. Here, Gauthier et al.show that the contact time of drops on a straight wire decreases with impact speed in a step manner due to the fragmentation of water in evenly divided subunits.

    • Anaïs Gauthier
    • , Sean Symon
    •  & David Quéré

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impact of drops on surfaces is highly relevant to our daily life and many industrial applications, such as self-cleaning and ink printing. Here, Haoet al. show the transition from superhydrophobic-like drop bouncing, due to a trapped air layer, to substrate-dependent bouncing on a liquid thin film.

    • Chonglei Hao
    • , Jing Li
    •  & Zuankai Wang

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