Why does honey flow in streams rather than trickle?

Honey can flow in a long line without drops, a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists for a long time.

Sergey Senchenko and Professor Tomas Bohr from the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby found that the long lines of honey were more stable than we thought. Not even a single shake could break it.

The scientists have published their research on the arXiv physics website, owned by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The water flowing under a hose is usually separated by droplets and drifts due to the influence of gravity and surface tension.Shaking, which mathematicians call spatial disorder or turbulence, also plays a motivating role in creating this disruption.

Picture 1 of Why does honey flow in streams rather than trickle?
Gravity and surface tension do not break down the viscous liquid into droplets.

But even more viscous liquids, like honey or syrup, don't work that way. These low-flow liquids form long, thin, stable fibers that do not drip, and for more than a century, scientists have been trying to understand why.

Danish researchers imagine that a drop of honey is squeezed from the tap, falling for an endless time and endlessly endlessly.

They then used a mathematical model to test what would disrupt this fluid flow. Scientists have previously shown that gravity and surface tension do not break down viscous liquid into droplets.

But in this mathematical model, the researchers created a vibration and observed the process by which droplets and vibrations occur over time.

They found that the vibration did not affect the fluid flow . This is because the droplet drifts fast enough to overcome the speed of slow vibrations.

No matter how thick the liquid, it is extremely stable, the team concludes.

Yvonne Stokes, a mathematician at the University of Adelaide in Australia, thinks that honey will split into drops provided you have to shake it hard.

"Many of the models we make predict that viscous fluid flows will break at some point, depending on viscosity and surface tension. However, extremely viscous liquids are not actually disconnected." into droplets paradigm suggests they can , " she said.