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Liquids bounce again

Jumping jets move from the bathroom to the kitchen.

After bouncing shampoo, physicists now bring you bouncing cooking oil. A team in Texas has found that the trampolining of a liquid jet falling onto a bath of the same liquid is more common than expected.

Read the story here.

If you do try this at home feel free to post YouTube links in the comments for our edification and amusement...

Posted by Oliver Morton on July 20, 2007 02:40 PM |

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I am an author of the research that this article discusses. I would like to point interested readers to our website for more information on the phenomena, including more detailed instructions on how to make a bouncing jet at home.

http://chaos.ph.utexas.edu/research/fluids/bouncing_jet.html

Posted by: Matthew Thrasher | July 20, 2007 08:20 PM

I have the feeling that this is fake...

Posted by: ggf | July 22, 2007 05:59 AM

I ran into this effect about 45 years ago. I was a summer student employee at a tetraethyl lead (TEL) lab. One of my duties was to titrate the TEL in antiknock fluid that was to be shipped. Old technicians would quickly squirt approximately the right amount of the liquid TEL into a titration beaker previously filled with a solvent mixture. Being a dilligent college student I carefully added the liquid drop by drop to get the optimal amount of TEL in the beaker. All my titrations came out disasterously low. Fortunately, before I was fired for incompetance, I noticed the cause. Colored drops of TEL had bounced out of the solvent and landed on the side of the beaker. The TEL drops evaporated before they were mixed into the solvent and titrated. Because the TEL was colored I could see that drops that splashed out had not mixed with the solvent. Recklessly squirting the TEL into the solvent prevented the bouncing, gave acceptable titrations and saved my job. I have since noticed the phenomena many other places, but just assumed that it was well known.

Posted by: George Bettoney | July 23, 2007 11:49 PM

Someone who firstly get in touch with this bouncing phenomena may have doubt on it because it is appeal to our daily experiences. So do I. I am one of the researchers that this article discussed. If you can follow the steps stated in the article, you may (with a big chance) make your bouncing jet in the kitchen by cooking oil or some other fiulds etc.

Posted by: Yee-Kwong Pang | July 24, 2007 05:42 PM

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