Best of the Web: Kármán Vortex visualized with liquid kerosene smoke in airflow. From Zdravkovich 1969.

Art: The stark contrast between the black background and white smoke and the photographic series format minimalistically  convey motion. Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photographic series of a galloping horse (The Horse in Motion) similarly uses stills to capture commonplace-but-fleeting movement.

Science:  The series shows that the relative interaction between the smoke stream and the wake vortices increases as the smoke source is moved from above to below the cylinder. The authors note that in figure 3b, smoke entering the stream on upper side of the cylinder, slips between the wake vortices and crosses to the other side of the wake. Figure 3f is the corresponding image of flow for the stream below the cylinder, so that superimposed, the two images demonstrate that air crosses the vortex street downstream of the cylinder disrupting the flow.

“Mass transfer across the Kármán vortex street” is Figure 3 in “Smoke observations of the formation of a Kármán vortex street” by M.M. Zdravkovich, published in Journal of Fluid Mechanics on 10 July 1969, vol. 37, part 3, pp.491-496. Accessed via https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-fluid-mechanics/article/smoke-observations-of-the-formation-of-a-karman-vortex-street/C9BFB26B8A755EAFFFA6ACC3C91800FB)