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Vibration Meets Cornstarch, Hole-arity Ensues

By retrospectacle on March 1, 2007.

This is so unbelieveable, I had to watch it twice. Needless to say, cornstarch water behaves very strangely when shaken (but not stirred) by high-speed vibrations. The result are faraday waves.

Faraday waves are nonlinear standing waves that appear on liquids enclosed by a vibrating receptacle. They are named after Michael Faraday, who first described them in an appendix to an article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1831.

If a layer of liquid is placed on top of a vertically oscillating piston, a pattern of standing waves appears which oscillates at half the driving frequency. These waves can take the form of stripes, close-packed hexagons, or even squares or quasicrystalline patterns.

The phenomenon has been described and published in 2004 by a group at the University of Texas, Austin.

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This is WAY cool! Do you think we could do this at home
without a paint mixer? And what would be the best mixture?

Of course, the other thing that cornstarch water is known for is that if you strike it with enough force it acts like a solid, but if you press on it gently it gives way like a liquid. Here's a somewhat silly YouTube demonstration...

Thank you all for the hints... Looks like I have some research to do....

i think it is time to market new wave lava lamps. these things could rock with colored cornstarch waves. i'm gonna get right on this.

At 120hz I think it would make a somewhat irritating lamp to have nearby. I want to do this anyway, I think I will start with a DC motor with a off center weight. Should work.

By Eric Juve (not verified) on 01 Mar 2007 #permalink