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With this ring…

vortices in coffee
Vortices behind a spoon dragged through coffee.

How many vortices do you see in your coffee? We finally arrive at the last in this series about the contributions of Helmholtz to the physics of a cup of coffee and the one that was to be the link with the (postponed) Coffee & Science evening at Amoret Coffee: vortices. But, beyond those that form behind a spoon, where do you see vortices in coffee and how can we connect them to dolphins?

Each morning as I prepare a pour over, I wait as each drop of coffee falls into the coffee bath below it. Some bounce up, some stay on the surface for some moments, many more pass straight through and get absorbed into the brew. I will admit that on most mornings, I am not thinking about the fact that I am watching one of the most beautiful pieces of physics unfold in front of my eyes and yet, this is how the processes occurring in the V60 were described by Lord Kelvin:

“[Helmholtz’s] admirable theory of vortex rings is one of the most beautiful of all beautiful pieces of mathematical work hitherto done in the dynamics of incompressible fluids.”

One of the most beautiful of all beautiful pieces of mathematical work? In my morning V60? How can we see these vortices as they fall? Sadly, it is perhaps easier to swap the coffee for plain water and drop food colouring into into it if we actually want to see these vortex rings form. As each coloured drop hits and goes through the surface, it forms a ring that curls up on itself and, if you are lucky, splits into many smaller rings, cascading to the bottom of the pot. You can see a film of the effect here or try it for yourself.

Vortex ring cascade, food colouring into plain water, V60 vortex
Dripping food colouring into a V60 of plain water: visualising the vortex rings that form every morning as you brew your coffee.

Each drop of coffee dripping from the filter into your coffee pot in the morning does this even if you can’t usually see it.

And though these rings must have been seen before Helmholtz’s paper in 1858, and even dolphins play with them in the sea, no one had attempted a mathematical model until Helmholtz. Helmholtz founded his mathematics on several theorems including the fact that a vortex cannot terminate within the fluid. It either has to terminate at the boundary of the fluid (like the vortex formed behind a spoon being dragged through coffee) or it has to close on itself (it forms a vortex ring) (more info here, opens as pdf).

Helmholtz seems to have come to vortices via an interest in organ pipes. He noticed that vortex sheets form at the inner surface of the pipe that can contribute significantly to the internal friction of the air flow through the pipe*. This means that, at the boundary between the moving air and the stationary air at the pipe edge there is a region of turbulent flow which leads to the formation of vortices. For Helmholtz, this had immediate consequences for measuring the speed of sound using pipes. Because where as previously the length of the organ pipe had been taken to be the distance between the maximum vibration (anti-node) and minimum vibration (node) of the sound wave, Helmholtz noticed that the presence of vortex sheets at the surface of the pipe would lead to an apparent lengthening of the resonator. If you used the length of the pipe to calculate the speed of sound, you would be very slightly wrong*.

As he investigated further, he found that these same surface-vortex effects explained a feature of organ design that had been known empirically but never explained. Why is it that in order for the character of the sound to be similar for each note, notes played through short, fat pipes must be accompanied by notes played through tall thin ones? Again it is to do with the air flow past the surfaces of the organ pipe.

vortices, turbulence, coffee cup physics, coffee cup science
Another cool consequence of boundary layers: Vortices created at the walls of a mug when the whole cup of coffee is placed on a rotating object (such as a record player).

In fact, these vortex sheets that appear at the boundaries between fluids appear so often, you can start to see them everywhere! They are in a cup of coffee if you put it on a record player (as with the picture of ink in a takeaway cup here) and they are in clouds that show a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Appearing like a series of waves on a cloud in the sky, Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities occur when a layer of cold dry air flows fast past a layer of hot and humid air. At the boundary of the two layers, a vortex structure forms and because the hot humid air encounters the cold dry air within that vortex, clouds can form at the boundary which reveal the vortices driving them. Although the conditions to create them must occur quite frequently, they last only a very short amount of time (less than a minute is typical) and so are considered quite rare. Look out for them next time you can see that the weather is changing and the clouds are fairly high in the sky.

Of course, it is not just on Earth and in coffee that we see these vortex structures. We see them in the weather patterns of other planets, in the solar wind and in jets leaving supernovae. And it is not just in fluids that Helmholtz’s mathematics of vortices proved useful. In Helmholtz’s equations the fluid velocity associated with a vorticity described (exactly analogously) the magnetic force produced by an electric current distribution*.

Kelvin Helmholtz instability in clouds over the M3 in January 2020
A Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in clouds over the M3 in January 2020.

Far more could be said about Helmholtz’s work on vortices and its links to both coffee and the weather on Saturn, but that will have to wait until the next Coffee & Science evening at Amoret. Until then, enjoy watching these astonishing structures in your coffee and let me know if you observe anything interesting with them.

This is the last in a series of articles on the contributions of Helmholtz to our understanding of coffee. You can read an introduction here, his work on vision and colour here, the sounds of coffee here and the energy of coffee here. Next time, we’ll be back to experimenting with coffee, please do let me know (on Twitter, FB or in the comments) of any experiments you have been doing at this time, what have you seen in your brew?

*”Worlds of Flow”, Olivier Darrigol, Oxford University Press, 2005