I'm a chemical engineering student at Auburn University and I am creating this blog for a class project. The purpose of this blog is to take my formal learning of fluid mechanics and write posts about how it affects the way I perceive natural phenomena in day to day activities. So far, we've had one week of class and have talked very little about fluid mechanics. I've watched several videos on the CD included with the textbook and they were very helpful in giving me a basic vocabulary to be able to describe fluid behavior. I've had a few technical observations that I've made recently but I can't remember their specifics. So, I’m going to describe this elementary picture for today's post.
To most this is just a drop of water falling into a pool of water. To the chemical engineer this image holds much more value. The relatively high surface tension of water causes the small water droplets that are the farthest from the surface to form spheres. Surface tension is the ability of a surface of a liquid to resist external forces. There is a certain energy and momentum that is associated with the falling droplet. It is this momentum and energy that governs the height of the resulting splash.
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