Vortex balls

Figure 5. The double-spiral longitudinal vortex. A longitudinal vortex showing the development of toroidal countervortices. These occur on interaction with the pipe walls and have an effect similar to ball bearings, enhancing the forward movement. Their interior rotation follows the direction of rotation and forward motion of the central vortex, whereas the direction of their exterior rotation and translatory motion are reversed. These toroidal vortices act to transfer oxygen, bacteria, and other impurities to the periphery of the pipe, where, because of the accumulation of excessive oxygen, the inferior, pathogenic bacteria are destroyed and the water rendered bacteria-free.

The other is the Eclipse reusable capsule-based device marketed to date by Sanofi-aventis (France) in Japan and Scandinavia. It contains up to four capsules at a time, loaded body first into the four chambers of the device. Eclipse uses a single blade to cut off the dome of the capsule body when the patient twists the device. Above the capsule, there is a vortex chamber in which a ball starts rotating as the patient inhales. The ball spins at high speed during inhalation, helping to disperse the powder into inhalable particles. 

The ball of fire grew even more slowly to a [diameter] of about [2,000 feet], until the dust cloud growing out of the skirt almost enveloped it. The top of the ball started to rise again at 2 s. At 3.5 s a minimum horizontal diameter, or neck, appeared one-third of the way up the skirt, and the portion of the skirt above the neck formed a vortex ring. The neck narrowed, and the ring and fast-growing pile of matter above it rose as a new cloud of smoke, carrying a convection stem of dust behind it The stem appeared twisted like a... 

The extensional thickening of polymer solutions is one form of viscoelastic behavior. This ability to support a tensile stress can also be demonstrated in a tubeless syphon with dilute aqueous solutions of polsrmers such as polyacrylamide or polyethylene oxide. If you suck up solution with a medicine dropper attached to a water aspirator and then lift the dropper out of the solution, the solution will still be sucked up. In shear, viscoelastic fluids develop normal stresses, which causes rod climbing on a rotating shaft, as opposed to the vortex and depressed surfaces that form with Newtonian liquids. Polsrmer solutions and semiliquid poljnners exhibit other viscoelastic behaviors, where, on short time scales, they behave as elastic solids. Silly putty, a childrens toy, can be formed into a ball and will slowly turn into a puddle if left on a flat surface. But if dropped to the floor it boimces. 

Fig. 4. The computation of the dimension of an attractor is illustrated using velocity data obtained fof a weakly turbulent flow in the Couette-Taylor system at R/R =16.0, where R is the Reynolds number for the onset of time-independent Taylor vortex flow. The different curves correspond to different embedding dimensions m. (a) The dependence of N(e), the average number of points within a ball of radius e, on e. (b) The slope of the curves shown in (a). Regions A,...

A better way of measuring flows than the ordinary orifice plate method is by inducing vortex shedding across a tube in the flowing liquid and then measuring the velocity of the vortices. This is a nice method, as there are no orifice taps to plug. Then there are Doppler meters, which measure the velocity of a fluid based on how the speed of sound is affected by the flow in a pipe. More commonly, we have rotometers, which measure how far a ball or float is lifted in a vertical tube by the velocity of the liquid. But regardless of their relative merits, perhaps simply for historical reasons, the vast majority of flows in most process plants are measured with the orifice plate flowmeter, shown in Fig. 10.7. 

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