Imagine a still pond at the edge of a forest. Make it a beautiful autumn day because that’s a nice thought. The surface is like smooth glass despite the rugged shape of the ground beneath it. This is because the surface of a fluid defines a zero potential height. Essentially the only forces acting on it are gravity and gravity is acting perpendicular to the surface. But what if you could include another force on the pond? How would the…
A diapir is region of lower density material (in this case salt) intruding into the overlying material. Salt Diapirs are formed through the slow process of evaporation, sedimentation, and compaction. A region experiences frequent flooding Subsequent evaporation will deposit salt The area is covered by later deposition where the overlying material will compact the deeper material. The density of the deeper sediment will increase while the density of salt is less affected by the pressure because of its crystal structure…
Reynold’s Number is a descriptive property of a flow that can help determine how heat and mass is transported. It is the ratio of the inertial to viscous force in the fluid (i.e. how fast is the flow moving relative to how viscous it is). Specifically, it can predict if a flow is laminar (smooth with little to no intersection between flow lines) or turbulent (chaotic with a lot of mixing of flow lines). A flow will transition between laminar and turbulent when…
The continuity equation in fluid dynamics says that mass is conserved throughout a fluid (mass flux in = mass flux out). Because a fluid is a continuous medium, there are different frames of reference to observe it properties, and this will affect how the continuity equation is calculated. In the Eulerian frame of reference, we focus on a fixed region of interest and allow the fluid to flow in and out and observe its properties. The only way to change…