Fluid juggling

Enrique Soto, Roberto Zenit

Published 2013-10-10Version 1

This fluid dynamics video is an entry for the Gallery of Fluid Motion for the 66th Annual Meeting of the Fluid Dynamics Division of the American Physical Society. We show the curious behaviour of a light ball interacting with a liquid jet. For certain conditions, a ball can be suspended into a slightly inclined liquid jet. We studied this phenomenon using a high speed camera. The visualizations show that the object can be `juggled' for a variety of flow conditions. A simple calculation showed that the ball remains at a stable position due to a Bernoulli-like effect. The phenomenon is very stable and easy to reproduce.