It all started when Destin Sandlin from the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day received a link to a very old video showing two colored toroidal vortices colliding and forming strange patterns. You might think that with modern technology it would be easy to reproduce that experiment, but Destin needed four years of work and the help of many people, including his friend and control engineer David Linderman. The video shows part of the journey, from initial prototypes to the final result.
A Four-Year Obsession
I don't know if it's entirely appropriate to say the experiment became an obsession for Destin, but it didn't take him long to realize it was a bit beyond his reach. At first he tried to build the platform that generates vortices on his own, without success. Then he got help from a group of students, and together they achieved limited success, though far from what you can see in the original video. Finally, Destin took what he had learned and joined forces with his friend and engineer David Linderman.
As expected, the experiment left fluid mechanics and physics in general behind to become an exercise in tenacity, patience, and perseverance. Apparently they only have a limited number of shots before they have to drain the tank and refill it with clean water. The effort of Destin and his friend was so great that he decided to publish a special 12-hour cut on his secondary channel, available below.
Obviously, the first aspect to highlight about the experiment is that we now have visual data that was not recorded with a camera from two decades ago. According to astronaut Donald Pettit (a veteran with more than 13 accumulated hours of EVA), the low-pressure zones that appear in the center of the nodules in the outer ring begin to suck material (the ink), breaking the ring at regular intervals. Something tells me we will see more about this vortex collision very soon.
