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Baldwin, KA 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9168-6412, Butler, SL and Hill, RJA,
2015.
Artificial tektites: an experimental technique for capturing the shapes of spinning drops.
Scientific Reports, 5: 7660.
ISSN 2045-2322
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Abstract
Determining the shapes of a rotating liquid droplet bound by surface tension is an archetypal problem in the study of the equilibrium shapes of a spinning and charged droplet, a problem that unites models of the stability of the atomic nucleus with the shapes of astronomical-scale, gravitationally-bound masses. The shapes of highly deformed droplets and their stability must be calculated numerically. Although the accuracy of such models has increased with the use of progressively more sophisticated computational techniques and increases in computing power, direct experimental verification is still lacking. Here we present an experimental technique for making wax models of these shapes using diamagnetic levitation. The wax models resemble splash-form tektites, glassy stones formed from molten rock ejected from asteroid impacts. Many tektites have elongated or ‘dumb-bell’ shapes due to their rotation mid-flight before solidification, just as we observe here. Measurements of the dimensions of our wax ‘artificial tektites’ show good agreement with equilibrium shapes calculated by our numerical model, and with previous models. These wax models provide the first direct experimental validation for numerical models of the equilibrium shapes of spinning droplets, of importance to fundamental physics and also to studies of tektite formation.
| Item Type: | Journal article |
|---|---|
| Publication Title: | Scientific Reports |
| Creators: | Baldwin, K.A., Butler, S.L. and Hill, R.J.A. |
| Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group |
| Date: | 7 January 2015 |
| Volume: | 5 |
| ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
| Identifiers: | Number Type 10.1038/srep07660 DOI BFsrep07660 PubMed ID |
| Divisions: | Schools > School of Science and Technology |
| Record created by: | Jonathan Gallacher |
| Date Added: | 28 Feb 2019 14:12 |
| Last Modified: | 28 Feb 2019 14:15 |
| URI: | https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/35853 |
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