Amazing demonstration of yet another example of things that just work better in 3D. Seeing the 3D simulation through a 2D video on a 2D screen works to get the point across but it's so much better with the affordances of XR. I am hopeful it will become standard to publish to that medium in the near future so you can just click on a web link to see this whole system floating around you at whatever scale and perspective you choose. That to me would really help your ability to use others minds to reason about a problem, as you put it so well.
Electrons would just strongly scatter. You would probably need a charge distribution that produces an EM field which looks like the vortex rings. I forget how the analogy for fluid systems works, I think you have to make Poynting vector <-> pressure vector for the math to look similar? Not sure if that would work exactly but you can definitely make a ball of EM turbulence.
> A group of University of Chicago scientists, however, have pioneered a way to create contained turbulence in a tank of water. They use a ring of jets to blow loops until an isolated “ball” of turbulence forms and lingers.
These remind me of particle collisions. A set of particles go in, and a set of particles go out, with momentum and angular momentum conserved. But instead of abstract mathematical "points", the particles in this case are smooth and free of singularities. Also, their interactions occur at a distance in a way that makes intuitive sense.
I was wondering the same. I know very little about either, but it reminds me of the containment issues that plasma fusion has, and I wondered if they could do something similar and make a controlled turbulence.
Shooting rings of plasma. Forming a ring of hot dense plasma moving quickly is an exercise for the reader.
It's alluring because turbulent modes are one of the leakier parts of magnetic confinement fusion devices. "Confining turbulence" is a thing that makes plasma physicists sit up in their chair.
Bulk plasmas behave as fluids as described by magnetohydronamic theory. If you observe a behavior in fluids there is a good chance that behavior will exist in plasmas if scaled correctly in size and time. Plasmas are, obviously, much more complicated. This warrants experimentation though because no one has ever tested something like this.
If this gives us better fluid dynamic models and better designs, it could be huge. Better ship propellers and hulls, cars, trucks, airplanes, jet engines. Wind turbines and gas turbines. Also combustion and all kinds of chemical reactions that need mixing.
My understanding is that this will not give us any breakthroughs in fluid dynamic modelling capabilities for real life applications.
The main challenge for turbulence modelling in applications is to accurately represent the boundary layers around walls, especially where you have transitions and separation. Isotropic turbulence like they have here is well resolved by existing models.
Nevertheless it is very cool stuff that you can do this. Although if I am to play devil's advocate, I do wonder at how "isolated" this turbulence actually is, since it's continuously being pumped by eight vortex ring generators.
Yeah, nothing really like that. That’s about containing a ball (/other shape) of gas in a vacuum. This is about creating a turbulent system that doesn’t propagate into nearby fluid.
It’s as if you stirred up a bathtub, but there were only waves in half the bathtub, with a fairly clear line between waves and still water.
That said, it’s related to the general problem of co trolling chaotic systems, so it’s possible that there might be theoretical insights which apply across that domain.
Naively, this idea would allow for turbulent “burning” regions within an otherwise smooth flow around a ring. The idea of a smooth boundary on your plasma constrained by magnets which has turbulent interior regions may turn out to be useful.
