Liquids can provide some especially tricky challenges for space travelers, but new research from the University of Mississippi could help engineer smarter, more efficient fluid control in zero- and low-gravity environments.
Likun Zhang, senior scientist at the National Center for Physical Acoustics and associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, led a research team studying how liquid waves move through barriers in low-gravity environments. Their results were published in Physical Review Letters.
"In low-gravity cases like the space station, surface tension dominates everything," said Zhengwu Wang, a fourth-year Ole Miss doctoral student in physics and co-author of the study. "The curvature of the water - the meniscus - is going to appear around structures, and we wan