Levitating Drop in a Tilted Rotating Tank - Gallery of Fluid Motion Entry V044

TL;DR

This study investigates the behavior of a water drop levitating within silicone oil in a tilted, rotating cylindrical tank under laminar flow conditions, using high-speed video to analyze the dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces an experimental setup to observe droplet levitation in a tilted, rotating tank, exploring fluid interactions under specific laminar flow conditions.

Findings

Water drop reaches a stable levitation state.

Drop position depends on tilt angle and rotation speed.

Flow remains laminar with Re ~ 5.

Abstract

A cylindrical acrylic tank with inner diameter D = 4 in. is mounted such that its axis of symmetry is at some angle measured from the vertical plane. The mixing tank is identical to that described in [1] The tank is filled with 200 mL of 1000 cSt silicone oil and a 5 mL drop of de-ionized water is placed in the oil volume. The water drop is allowed to come to rest and then a motor rotates the tank about its axis of symmetry at a fixed frequency = 0.3 Hz. Therefore the Reynolds number is fixed at about Re ~ 5 yielding laminar flow conditions. A CCD camera (PixeLink) is used to capture video of each experiment.