How do fluids actually mix? 

Corrections and FAQ in this comment! Official FAQ video will eventually be on the second channel youtube.com/@alphaphoenix2 1) Really cool demo of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in a much more controlled situation: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qgamfo86FQo.html

legend says if you say laminar flow in front of the mirror 3 times Destin shows up

“It’s not hoarding, it’s planning ahead.” 😁👍 To a scientist/engineer all recourse are “Precious”.

Different types of flow?! Countdown til Destin shows up! 🎉🎉🎉

Pro tip: set your quality to 4K for this video, even if you don't have a 4K screen. Even on 1440p, the RU-vid compression algorithm does a real number on these swirls.

I love how Destin's on a monitor in the background when you're talking about just how laminar it is. 8:45

19:11 I love the reference to This Old Tony.

Have you tried running the water backward in the reverse osmosis tube? In water treatment plants, they do that to prevent clogging and preserve the throughput. They call this 'backwashing' or 'backflushing', but the don't deal with ink.

There are microfluidic devices called spiral separators. These are usually use separate different cells based on density. Probably not useful for sorting ink, but might be worth a try for fluorescent polystyrene particles?

The obligatory ToT reference now that you have a welder was perfect

There are two important phrases that will cover most of your metal working projects: 1) Beat to fit, paint to match. 2) Grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't.

We should all be so lucky as to have some mildly diluted ink sitting around. You never know.

What you want is ultrasonic separation. This is used in grand scale industrial applications. Basically using standing waves to "catch" particles. But be warned, that's a rabbit hole on it's own.

Get ready for 100 Chinese knockoffs to flood amazon with this

17:55 The problem you had with the endcaps leaking might not actually be solved. Waterproofing 3d prints is notoriously hard because of the pores they have between the layers. This can be helped by extra perimeters and higher temperatures like you did, or smoothing the part by dissolving the surface with isopropyl alcohol vapors. However, most 3D printable plastics (like PLA and PETG which you used) are hydroscopic, which means that the plastic itself will absorb water. At very high pressure differences, like your 100 psi chamber, the water will still be forced through the plastic. A lot of submersibles with 3d printed parts have the same problem. You can try high-impact polystyrene (HIPS), which is not very hydroscopic.

Cool project! I also liked the "supposedly working" quip: that's the hallmark of fascinating physics: you may end up in a phase when you do nothing other than sit mesmerized and stare at whatever you have built. The story here in Göttingen goes that Max von Laue sat for half an hour just staring right at an x-ray tube with a screen in front of it when first being shown his crystallographic patterns.

The only thing more hypnotic than that tube structure is your lovely explanation

babe drop everything AlphaPhoenix percolates

One of the most valuable channels on RU-vid

6:46 thats why fire departments moved to 4” hydrant hookups instead of 2 2.5” hoses on the same hydrant

He says lava lamp, but the music tells me I'm in orbit...

Reversing water flow through filters is used to clean massive aquarium filters. Also have you considered using nasty chemicals like a lava lamp? And nice work!

That thing looks insane. This and Steve Mold's mica setup are showing really cool fluid dynamics.

0:21 Wow I was way caught off guard by the KSP OST

Crazy how mesmerizing it actually is though

Jupiter and Saturn in a pipe.

You having this many subscribers kinda give me hope regarding humanity. Because your content is pure science, wonder, understanding...

I know everything in this video from fluid mechanics class but getting to watch it explicitly in a video is why I love this channel so much

Maybe try removing the flow restriction after the ink at regular intervals to wash away the ink fouling from your filter. Backflowing some water through the filter may also help clear the fouling, though I'm not sure if your filter can handle that.

Wow this is really amazing, I think the fascination of the patterns it makes is the same fascination we have with fire, the patterns resemble fire. Awesome stuff bro!!

The introduction of the welder has such a This Old Tony vibe

If you coated the inside of the pipe wifh a superhydrophobic substance, you would get different flow characteristics. Might be worth a try!

This makes me think of the big bang. Water at the far end is the stars speeding up.

We absolutely need a This Old Tony response video talking about physics.

A fluid will always have laminar flow when is being sucked. Versa, it will always exhibit turbulent flow when is being pushed ( under pressure ). These 2 behaviors are governed by the local dynamic impedance. When a fluid is sucked, the suction effect creates zones of under-pressure which allow the fluid to start organizing (moving) itself through the path of least resistance/impedance and such, given enough time creates laminar though the engine fluid can have a curl gradient.

Your way of mixing science and engineering is infectious. Wacky ideas and none of them boring. Many of them people can do at home if they really wanted to.

Great job! This is personally interesting as my 3 year old grandson ask his parents what turbulence is which they passed on to me. So I made a little movie for him using a coffee carafe and food coloring. I spun up the water and let it settle and become laminar, then added a couple of drops of food coloring. Due to some remaining shear it formed cylinders that were remarkably stable. Introducing a small diameter cylinder provided great turbulence on the backside. My grandson got through at least half of it before he got bored.

Pretty cool. BTW, gear pumps are quite quiet. Especially if driven by servo and magnetically coupled (bit overkill, but that was setup we used for pumping printer ink)

Really cool project! This video deserves way more views!

This has the same mesmerizing details as sometimes looking at the sky and the cloud details. Love it.

My favorite!!! when thermodynamics meet fluid dynamics! So exciting!

You had me at "better than a lava lamp" I love lava lamps. Edit: Even better idea: Use smoke and a laser array instead of water. Still fluid but you're using one fluid instead of two so you don't have to filter anything.

I'm so glad to see this channel starting to grow exponentially. Your content is pure gold, and just seems to keep getting better.

This is amazing, especially how you can see the transition from turbulent to laminar. Loved the “Now I’m getting graphs like *that*” too lol :)

To make the filters last longer instead of ink use a long polymer of plastic with dark colour. Think tiny micro plastic beads that will be as fine as ink but easily stopped through a filter/

You have an uncanny knack for answering questions I didn't know how to ask

whenever you upload, not only is it incredibly interesting and educating, but the experiments, demonstrations and contraptions you come up with are so unique. you have a special mind, thanks for sharing that with us.

The patterns at the end of the pipe really remind me of surfaces of gas planets. I would be really cool to have the same thing as two spheres where the liquid moves between a inner spinning and an outer static sphere

reverse osmosis filters need regular flushing through the 'brine' or 'waste' outlet to keep the membrane from clogging, and extend its lifetime by at least double.

What a beautiful build, I missed the upload, but look forward to your next part!

Forget laminar flow and turbulent flow, this is a perfect representation of entropy!

Thank you for uploading. Last night I was craving this kind of tinkering engineering video. Thanks for coming through!

Awesome video. thank you for making it!

I work with heating networks (which is mostly just a bunch of water flowing through pipes) and there we also think of it as analogous to electrical circuits a lot! Basically the water flow throughout the network follows Kirchhoffs laws, and the "resistance" of a pipe is modeled as being dependent on the flow speed (because fast moving water will become more turbulent and so encounter more friction). It's a pretty effective analogy!

The tube allegories our universe; left side: Big Bang, right side: Heat Death.

I really enjoyed this video, thank you Brian!!!

Another excellent video. Thank you.

Cant wait for the next video!

Love the craftsmanship and science. Beautiful video :)

Loved this project! ❤

Forget the filter! Set up a complex centrifuge cascade to separate the ink and water by their mass difference alone. As a bonus you can enrich uranium too

RO systems are really sweet. I tame a boiler that used a monster RO system to supply water. What kills the membrane is not have a high enough reject water. You have to waste water that flushes the filtered particles off the filter or it will plug up.

The whole thought process and discovery journey is awesome! Cool project and very impressive!

Here is an idea. Use a higher viscosity fluid. Second, use a magnetic ink and use a magnet to re-separate them, no filter. PS brilliant and beautiful work 🥰

This is like the fractionated elutriation filtered, color coded particle size, patterned laminar flow layer disruption display, from my impossible to implement ideas notebook. I'd love to see this with rheoscopic fluid, maybe laser planes, and remote control disruptions for things like vortex shedding analysis, to visualize even more more complex currents.

"You want your tea to be uniform." - Well. Now that I think about it, I never thought to myself: Ah, yes! Uniform tea! Just as I like it.

In automotive, they use a degas bottle plumbed to the high point in the system to get rid of trapped gasses. Bypasses a tiny volume of the full system back to the inlet

Laminar flow. You just became Destin's best friend.

At first I was wondering why you didn't go for the classic mica in water approach, but by the end I understood it wasn't about the turbulent and laminar flow as much as it was about mixing and diffusion in total.

As always an amazing show mate

Lovely video, congrats!

I am so ready for the reverse osmosis video. I fell down the rabbit hole when I put one in for my ice maker, but I'm sure you'll go much deeper with your video.

I can see that watching this after a stressful day can have soothing effects.

Enjoyed learning about this project! In my automotive electrical class, my instructor compared voltage to pressure in a water hose. Lots of similarities between hydraulic and electronic circuits as well. Understanding one helps understand the other- you're not weird for thinking that way!

My left ear really likes that bell sound!

Such a beautiful device! Combining art and science is just the best.

The reverse osmosis filter require rinsing flow on the outside of the membrane to keep it clean. Even with just tap water it would plug if it wasn't dumping water down the drain. Then you are restrcting the output of side, worsening the problem. I would consider recirculating the pumped mixture to keep the flow moving on the outside the membrane

This would be the sickest desk lamp. Take my money.

knocked it out of the park, as usual

I'm pretty sure fluid dynamics and turbulent flow is one of my utmost favorite things in nature.

The part I find most interesting about this is the choice of what to mix with the water. I'm curious as to where the sweet spot for particle size is. That filter is wild.

best tip for welding: "Grinder and paint makes me the welder I ain't."

I feel like in another universe this is the love child between veratasium and smarter every day

Damn that's so cool!

Back with another banger.

Makes me think of the overall flow of a human life. Thank you.

I absolutely love "mad science" channels like this one. Maybe one of my favorite things about the modern internet. Thanks!

It's my understanding that you can get different micron RO membranes just like other filters. For the sake of simplicity I'll use insanely rough numbers lol. You could pre-filter your ink by running it though a 2 micron membrane then dump all the product water(the water that was filtered). This would leave the waste(un filtered) water/ink at a size > 2 micron. Then switch over to the 1 micron filter. This should allow for better filtering. Also don't forget that you can bypass the restrictor on the waste output to flush the membrane from time to time. They make a kit for that pump to do this automatically every time it's turned off but you don't have a conventional setup. I would assume you'd have to have a reservoir aside from the viewing chamber for this to automatically work. I have a lot of experience with RO systems. I built a system that replaced buying water bottles for drinking and have been going down that rabbit hole ever since. It paid for itself in 2 months. Check out how RO boost pumps work. It's kind of like a mechanical ram pump but for RO systems. You can also run RO membranes in series for quite a bit more flow. Waste from filter 1 goes into the inlet of filter 2. Product water of both filters get tied together. There is a salt water aquarium channel that has done a lot of testing with RO and its some pretty neat stuff. It might help you come up with ideas to improve this. I kind of want to build one for my wife to show the kids that come to their STEAM events. Silicone grease on O-rings make a world of difference. You may also want to use a UV RO light with your setup so stuff wont start to grow... I'd put it on the outlet of the viewing reservoir.

I watched Destin’s ~4-hour video where he did fun stuff with ink and water. This is a surprisingly well-served art form on RU-vid.

Holy *smokes* Homie O.O You-pick-the-hardest-stuff too tackle!

"I actually imagine water flowing through pipes as if they were circuits..." hahaone of the special few!

0:18 Gotta love it when you come across a video randomly using Kerbal Space Program music. 😅 What an amazing machine you've made

Not even 30 seconds in and he's hacking my brain with ksp music.

A centrifuge comes to mind to solve the filter and pressure issues, though loading and unloading it is kind of a challenge to automate and keep reasonably isolated from the outside world.

It's a very cool project for sure! I think the filters clogging is normal, on saltwater desalination they reverse flush the filters at certain times to unclog the pores and have a secondary pressurized loop for this. You could put in a second loop that does a reverse flush with clean water every so often. Of coure the ink could bind to the filter relatively permanentely then you would need different material for the filter (I mean you only need the ink not to go through, right, does not have to filter down to water atoms), but putting a reverse-flush on a timer could extend the life of the system at least a bit.

If you did a larger scale vertical tube, you may be able to use it to separate the ink in situ, and just use a tiny pump on a duty cycle to pump the settled ink from the bottom to the top. Also maybe if you warmed the ink up it might not fall right away and would do cool convection things

I was thinking about how to remove the particulate from the water more efficiently. Some kind of prefilter would probably be very useful, maybe a cyclonic filter? Or perhaps with a different ink, you could use biphasic solvent separation?

just like the Falling/Flowing Sand toys, very fun to watch.

Neat. I've seen reversible mixing with a cylinder rotated one way to mix, the other way to unmix, using a viscous fluid.

This is awesome! I hope you get a cool collab from this!