Greg Gipson, james Page, and Kuai Yu, University of North Carolina


Inertial Oscillations, Entrainment, and Critical Length Scales of Falling Spheres in Stratified Fluids

Abstract: This contains a body of research directed towards a better understanding of the behavior of uniform density spheres in stratified fluid layers. Specifically efforts have been made to achieve a more complete understanding of the unknown parameters in the coupled ordinary differential equations used to model this behavior derived by Abaid et al. in their 2004 paper "An internal splash: Levitation of falling spheres in stratified fluids." Data is presented on the relative magnitude of the entrained fluid around the sphere and the stable solution of the entrained fluid. Lastly, the possible existence of an optimal stratification to induce transverse motion is presented and the factors behind the general behavior of the phenomenon are explored.

Undergraduate Mentor:Rich McLaughlin (UNC)