Hydrodynamic education with rheoscopic fluid

Abstract

We present a educational poster supporting the subject „Mechanics of fluids I“, which the students evaluate to be difficult mainly due to abstractness. Our goal is to show in vivo the behavior, especially the non-linearity, of various flows transiting into turbulence. The fluid motion is visualized by using the rheoscopic fluid, which consist of water and the dust of mica, whose particles are longitudinal and shiny resulting into easily observable reflections, when the particles coherently orient along the maximum stress. This happens mainly in shear layers, e.g. at the boundary between vortex core and envelope. An example of flow transiting into turbulence is the Taylor-Couette flow between two concentric cylinders, which with increasing Taylor number passes through various regimes from fully laminar bearing flow through the Taylor vortex flow (TVF) and later Wavy vortex flow (WVF) up to Turbulent Taylor vortices regime (TTV) and, finally, the regime of featureless turbulence.