Turbulence generation through an iterative cascade of the elliptical instability

Turbulence is everywhere -- it rattles our airplanes and makes tiny whirlpools in our bathtubs -- but it's one of the least understood phenomena in physics. This study identified a fundamental mechanism of how turbulence develops by smashing vortex rings into each other head-on, recording the results with ultra-high-resolution cameras, and reconstructing the collision dynamics using a 3D visualization program. Coupled with other data from simulations, this paper gained new insights into how… (advances.sciencemag.org) Altro...