Examine: Leidenfrost impact happens in all three water phases: Stable, liquid, and vapor

Sluggish-motion video of boiling ice, a analysis challenge of the Nature-Impressed Fluids and Interfaces Lab at Virginia Tech.

Sprint a number of drops of water onto a highly regarded, scorching skillet and so they’ll levitate, sliding across the pan with wild abandon. Physicists at Virginia Tech have found that this will also be achieved by putting a skinny, flat disk of ice on a heated aluminum floor, in keeping with a brand new paper printed within the journal Bodily Overview Fluids. The catch: there is a a lot larger important temperature that should be achieved earlier than the ice disk will levitate.

As we have reported beforehand, in 1756, a German scientist named Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost reported his commentary of the weird phenomenon. Usually, he famous, water splashed onto a highly regarded pan sizzles and evaporates in a short time. But when the pan’s temperature is nicely above water’s boiling level, “gleaming drops resembling quicksilver” will kind and can skitter throughout the floor. It is referred to as the “Leidenfrost impact” in his honor.

Within the ensuing 250 years, physicists got here up with a viable clarification for why this happens. If the floor is at the very least 400 levels Fahrenheit (nicely above the boiling level of water), cushions of water vapor, or steam, kind beneath them, protecting them levitated. The Leidenfrost impact additionally works with different liquids, together with oils and alcohol, however the temperature at which it manifests might be totally different. 

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