A virtual redirect

For those of you stumbling across this blog looking for my blog, I have to warn you, this isn't it. This was a required 'blog' for my Continuum Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics class, where I commented on lectures and readings. If you want to read my actual journal (not that I have anything deep in there, just comments about what's up in my life) check out my google+ .

So I started reading the paper for the project, and it started by doing nondimensionalization just like we did in class on Monday. So that was exciting.

The lecture notes for lecture 10 are, again, pretty reasonable. It would be nice if it were more explicit in them that we aren't taking any particular initial drop condition - I kept going back and trying to figure out what we were assuming about initial conditions, until I realized that the final product of the first section would be a DE for the drop, and that we didn't actually start with any particular L and h when doing the nondimensionalization. Only in the last section did we figure out what the shape of the drop can be.

That lecture seemed pretty short compared to previous ones... I didn't see how the first part, on nondimensionalization, tied in to the second part, about the effects of a thin layer of fluid. Both parts seemed pretty straightforward though, I don't have any particular questions about them.

Lecture 8

So in a fit of not working on a hum paper, I've worked ahead on the reading and the homework a bit. Lecture 8 is a pretty reasonable lecture, not too bad. I'd appreciate a review of how we know the thickness of the boundary layer in both cases - I especially didn't get where the last boundary layer number came from, I don't see how to get that. Overall, I'm happy with these last two lectures and the homework :)

Lecture 7

This lecture was a good bit easier - probably because last time I finally got all that surface tension stuff :) As seems to be the norm, the trickiest part is the setup of the linearized equations - there's a lot of information in a pretty small space, so I'll need to reread that again to get it fully, but that seems to be the way things generally work in this class, so I'm not too worried, it's getting easier to do that.

Lecture 6:

This lecture was trickier... I could definitely do with seeing the linearization from page 6.5 more explicitly. Or maybe I just need to go back and reread the previous lecture notes for similar things and then I'll get it. I'm not sure what else specifically to ask about - the material all seemed to make sense, but it feels like there's just a lot of it, a bunch of slightly different things to derive. I didn't really spend that much time on it either, I had a clinic presentation this week and the homework due tomorrow has been pretty hard. Ah well, I'll take another look at all the stuff and try to digest it all.

Lecture 5

That reading had an interesting collection of phenomena in it. It both started and ended on notes I didn't really get though - I wasn't understanding why the surface tension is given by "surface energy = T * surface area", it wasn't obvious to me that T had to be a constant that doesn't depend on any other parts of the geometry. And at the end, there was a note about sonoluminescence, and I didn't really get how an oscillating bubble would give rise to that. But that's okay, the middle is the part that's important for now, I guess. I mostly got that - though perhaps I should read it over again, I thought I'd gotten the homework too but going over it in class last time I realized that I'd missed some problems I thought I had right, so I should give the reading another read-over. I'm still not clear on the beginning of the bubble-oscillation section, what we do to get the order-epsilon terms.