Hadley cells for lunch

quinoa convection

At lunch today we were amazed by these near-perfect convection cells that formed in a pot of quinoa. You can DIY at NOAA. I think this is an instance of Benard-Marangoni convection, because the surface is free, though the thinness assumptions are likely violated, and quinoa is not quite an ideal liquid. Anyway, it’s an interesting phenomenon because the dynamics involve a surface tension gradient, not just heat transfer. See this and this.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

94 ÷ 94 =

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.