AsianScientist (Apr. 23, 2015) – Numerical simulations have shown that liquid vortices can self-organize to realize a variety of states found in condensed matter, such as crystalline and glassy states. This research has been published in Nature Communications.
Self-organization describes the phenomenon of the spontaneous emergence of complex structures and systems. As one example of this phenomenon, just as a school of fish swimming in water takes on a particular shape, particles moving in a liquid flow sometimes spontaneously take on complex structures.
As phenomena that appear in both the natural world and in living organisms, self-organization has recently been the focus of much research interest. However, the mechanism behind the self-organization of moving particles in liquid flow remained unknown until now .
A research group led by Professor Tanaka Hajime of the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo, simulated the rotation of disks that created vortices in liquids. They found that this system was stabilized through the self-organization of the liquid flow.
This self-organization in a liquid flow is completely different to the normal concept of self-organization in that it is realized entirely from the flow alone and does not require any form of static interaction, something that had been considered necessary.
This result should open up new avenues of research into self-organization through the demonstration that it is possible to control the spatial arrangement of particles using liquid flow alone.
The article can be found at: Goto et al. (2015) Purely Hydrodynamic Ordering Of Rotating Disks At A Finite Reynolds Number.
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Source: The University of Tokyo.
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