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Active Cheerios Self-Propel
The interface where air and water meet is a special world of surface-tension-mediated interactions. Cereal lovers are well-aware of the Cheerios effect, where lightweight O's tend to attract one another, courtesy of their matching menisci. And those who have played with soap boats know that a gradient in surface tension causes flow. (Research and image credit: J. Wilt et al.; via Ars Technica) Read the full article
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Enhancing the Cheerios Effect
The Cheerios in your morning cereal clump together with one another and the bowl's wall due to an attractive force caused by the curvature of their menisci. A recent study looks at how this effect changes when you're pulling objects out of the liquid. (Image credit: Cheerios - D. Streit, experiment - H. Bense et al.; research credit: H. Bense et al.; via APS Physics) Read the full article
In the Cheerios effect, floating objects can fall into one another due to capillary attraction -- just like Cheerios link up in a cereal bowl. Here researchers play with that effect by adding repulsive magnets to their "cereal" pieces. (Video credit: A. Hooshanginejad et al.)
File this one under Cool Things I Would Have Never Thought Of. In this video, researchers play around with the flow around a spinning top and end up creating a fractal, granular raft. (Image and video credit: B. Keshavarz and M. Geri)
Artificial Microswimmers
Tiny organisms swim asymmetrically, often using wave-like motions of tiny, hair-like cilia along their bodies. Mimicking this behavior in artificial swimmers is tough; how would you actuate so many micro-appendages? (Image, research, and submission credit: Y. Collard et al.) Read the full article
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In "Focus, Vol. 1," photographer Roman De Giuli follows colorful droplets as they roll along, chase one another, and burst. (Image and video credit: R. De Giuli)
Particles at an interface like to gather into a raft thanks to the Cheerio's effect, and once formed, breaking them up can be hard. (Image and research credit: A. Lagarde and S. Protière)
You’ve probably noticed that cereal clumps together in your breakfast bowl, but you may not have given much thought as to why. This tendency for objects at an interface to attract is known as the Cheerios effect, although it happens in more than just cereal, as Joe Hanson from It’s Okay to Be Smart explains. The effect is a combination of buoyancy, gravity, and surface tension acting in concert.
When air, a liquid, and a solid meet, they form a meniscus, the curvature of which depends on characteristics of their interaction. Light, buoyant cereal and the walls of your bowl both have upward-curving menisci. Denser objects, like the tacks shown below, stay at the surface only because surface tension holds them up. Their meniscus curves downward.
Objects with a similar meniscus curvature will attract. For cereal approaching a wall, the light Cheerio is buoyant enough that there’s an upward force on it, but it’s constrained to stay at the interface. It cannot rise, but that buoyancy is enough to let it climb the meniscus at the wall. The two tacks attract one another for similar reasons, except this time their weight helps them fall into one another. Check out the full video to see more examples of this effect in nature! (Video and image credit: It’s Okay to Be Smart; research credit: D. Vella and L. Mahadevan, pdf)
