We Know Simple Fluids Can Flow. Turns Out, Some Can Fracture
While working with a hydrocarbon blend, I heard a sharp crack that shouldn't have happened. Simple fluids like crude oil are expected to flow, not snap like glass. Our high-speed cameras revealed these liquids undergo brittle fractures at incredible speeds, challenging the long-held belief that elasticity is required for such breaks. This discovery suggests that cohesive energy, not just elasticity, dictates when a liquid will shatter.
Nobody expected that this would be possible in this kind of simple fluid because viscosity usually just rearranges the molecules.
- jzer0cool
This seems more of inertia, Newton's first law. "An object at rest stays at rest,...". What comes to mind say there is some threshold acceleration (e.g. or at extreme, accelerate to c within some short time, t), then essentially you have a body at rest and breaks at the weakest point. Interesting would be seeing this effect with varying viscosity.
- immmmmm
> a project in collaboration with the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil
I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.
- brador
Should be called semi-rigid fluids. They have a structure, it’s just weak and breaks at weak points as you would expect.
- dd8601fn
This looks like silly putty behavior.
- dataflow
Second comment for a semi-off-topic question: does the state of matter depend on the gravity?
Thought-experiment: take any solid, put it in an infinitely strong cup, and crank up gravity. At some point gravity overwhelms the forces holding the substance together and thus the substance ends up breaking apart and.. filling the cup just like a liquid, no?
Does everything become liquid-like at sufficiently high gravity? How does one distinguish what's a solid or a liquid when gravity seems to make them behave similarly?