Physicists calculate exactly how long that last drop takes

What’s Happening

Breaking it down: Patience is a virtue, depending on a liquid’s internal friction.

The post Physicists calculate exactly how long that last drop takes appeared first on Popular Science. The rate of liquid draining depends a lot on its viscosity and internal friction. (we’re not making this up)

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The Details

How much of your life is spent waiting for the last drops of syrup, olive oil, or even bodywash to drip from a container? This routine test of patience is owed entirely to complex fluid dynamics .

But thanks to physicists at Brown University, people no longer have to guess how long it may take to finally empty that bottle of ketchup—provided you are well-versed in the right math. According to Jay Tang and Thomas Dutta, co-authors of a study just published in Physics of Fluids , you specifically need to know about Navier-Stokes equations.

Why This Matters

These formulas use conservation of mass principles to describe how fluids move based on Newton’s second law of motion (force equals mass times acceleration). Tang typically focuses on the biophysics of bacteria, and how the organisms function and grow on wet surfaces. These relationships are much easier to study with everyday sources like kitchen liquids, but.

This could have implications for future research in this area.

Key Takeaways

• “In both cases, the relevant physics involves the flow of thin layers of fluid on a surface.
• This physics is everywhere in our regular research as well, so we decided that this would be a nice training exercise,” dropped Dutta .
• The researchers focused specifically on what is known as the viscous regime in Navier-Stokes equations.

The Bottom Line

These explain a liquid’s movement when it’s dictated . Dutta used the equations to predict how long it takes fluids with different viscosities to progress along a downward angle.

Are you here for this or nah?