Bites and blue

H. has painted her room in blue and C. asked her not to paint the whole house in blue. But the whole house is almost blue already. Through the window, the dark shades of the tall trees are painted against the dark marine blue of a belated dusk.

I applied this morning to give a bite-sized talk this coming autumn. The proposal for a 15-minute talk goes like this:

"When oil is extracted from a well at the bottom of the ocean and pumped along the pipe, amounts of water and gases are present from the bore well. It might not look important, but the manner in which all these components flow and behave in the pipe actually is of vital significance, in terms of efficiency and safety of the operation.

Under certain conditions, in horizontal pipes, oil travels on top of water, a flow pattern called "stratified". However, such configuration can become unstable (i.e. drop formation, unstable waves, etc.), and my research is concerned with this point: what makes a stratified flow unstable, why and how?

The difficult task to understand the nature of the flow inside the pipe has been attempted by many in the last decades, and many tools, models and solutions have been provided. Of course, there is still room for improvements, but the fact that many brilliant researches and some for many years have devoted themselves to the problem, worries me: how can I (who am new in the field, a sort of layman) contribute to the current state of knowledge?

In the last months, I have realized that the improvement of the models shall start from basic observations. Perhaps, in our time, one is tempted to think that progress is necessarily tied to advanced and complex techniques and that science and engineering are, more than ever, a closed realm for more and more initiated and exclusive specialists, away from the common mind, using state-of-the-art technology. However, I came to realize that the final laws of fluid mechanics, which are widely accepted and of used in stratified flows and everywhere else, were developed from the 18th century and that the big names and men did not have access to complex or special tools: they only had the power of their brains and relied intensely on basic observations of Nature.

Along with the use of current techniques, I am carrying simple experiments in the lab by bringing together oil and water in different manners and gathering all information that I can from observation. I think these experiments are visual and nice and very accessible to all, and make the nature of the problem clearer.

I wish to present my work in this manner, by showing my experiments in video clips and photographs and ideal scenarios and talk about them carrying the audience with me. I am convinced it will be a very entertaining short talk to them. The idea is not mine, of course: one cannot be the same after reading the Christmas lectures of Michael Faraday".

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Amen.

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