Scientists create contained ball of turbulence in a tank

Thank you, this video made it instantly understandable.

The visualization of the paths of the vortex rings looks mimetically like electron orbitals

Amazing demonstration of yet another example of things that just work better in 3D. Seeing the 3D simulation through a 2D video on a 2D screen works to get the point across but it's so much better with the affordances of XR. I am hopeful it will become standard to publish to that medium in the near future so you can just click on a web link to see this whole system floating around you at whatever scale and perspective you choose. That to me would really help your ability to use others minds to reason about a problem, as you put it so well.

Fascinating! I wonder if this explains ball lightning?

Thanks for sharing! Amazing video...

Also reminds me of this classic - Schrodinger's smoke from SIGGRAPH 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C9BLAXCe1I

“A steady, tunable, isolated turbulent blob!”

Did they also try repeatedly colliding 2 vortex rings? That may make more sense of what parameter changes do (?)

Now to devise a way for a Susano'o next.

You just summarised the whole thing in a sentence! (Of course one needs to know at least a few 100 episodes of Naruto)

These remind me of particle collisions. A set of particles go in, and a set of particles go out, with momentum and angular momentum conserved. But instead of abstract mathematical "points", the particles in this case are smooth and free of singularities. Also, their interactions occur at a distance in a way that makes intuitive sense.

Also detonation. It Could make Rotation Detonation Engines possible.

Isn’t it inertial? What would the equivalent be with plasma/fusion?

I was wondering the same. I know very little about either, but it reminds me of the containment issues that plasma fusion has, and I wondered if they could do something similar and make a controlled turbulence.

My understanding is that this will not give us any breakthroughs in fluid dynamic modelling capabilities for real life applications.

The main challenge for turbulence modelling in applications is to accurately represent the boundary layers around walls, especially where you have transitions and separation. Isotropic turbulence like they have here is well resolved by existing models.

Nevertheless it is very cool stuff that you can do this. Although if I am to play devil's advocate, I do wonder at how "isolated" this turbulence actually is, since it's continuously being pumped by eight vortex ring generators.

It makes me, naively, think of applications in fusion plasma.

A ball lightning needs a blob of charged particles and a powerful magnetron nearby to keep that blob spinning.

They study what happens when 8 smoke rings collide!

I think the big problem there is neutrons that we can't contain or influence much.

Yeah, nothing really like that. That’s about containing a ball (/other shape) of gas in a vacuum. This is about creating a turbulent system that doesn’t propagate into nearby fluid.

It’s as if you stirred up a bathtub, but there were only waves in half the bathtub, with a fairly clear line between waves and still water.

That said, it’s related to the general problem of co trolling chaotic systems, so it’s possible that there might be theoretical insights which apply across that domain.

The strange thing about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in this universe of ours is that almost everything is related.