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Amazing Leaping Shampoo - The Kaye Effect

William Parcher

Show me the monkey!
William Parcher
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
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Well, you just have to see the Kaye Effect in action. It's an interesting feature of fluid dynamics and can be demonstrated using a dropping stream of shampoo.


Demonstration and explanation of Kaye Effect - YouTube

More Kaye Effect - YouTube

Still more - "lanyard of shampoo"


Leaping shampoo and the stable Kaye effect. Authors: Michel Versluis, Cor Blom, Devaraj van der Meer, Ko van der Weele, Detlef Lohse

Shear-thinning fluids exhibit surprisingly rich behaviour. One example is the Kaye effect which occurs when a thin stream of a solution of polyisobutylene in Decalin is poured into a dish of the fluid. As pouring proceeds, a small stream of liquid occasionally leaps upward from the heap. This surprising effect, which lasts only a second or so, is named after its first observer A. Kaye, who could offer no explanation for this behaviour. Later, Collyer and Fischer suggested from 250 frames per second cine recordings that the fluid must be highly shear thinning as well as elastic and 'pituitous'. In addition, they concluded that a rigid surface is required to back the reflected liquid stream. While the words bouncing and reflection are associated with non-continuous and elastic effects, we will show here that the Kaye effect is in fact a continuous flow phenomenon. We show that the Kaye effect works for many common fluids, including shampoos and liquid soaps. We reveal its physical mechanism (formation, stability and disruption) through high-speed imaging. The measurements are interpreted with a simple theoretical model including only the shear thinning behaviour of the liquid; elastic properties of the liquid play no role. We show that the Kaye effect can be stable and that it can be directed. We even demonstrate a stable Kaye effect on a thin soap film excluding the necessity of a rigid backing surface.
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Does there need to be a solid surface below? or has anyone filled a fishtank with clear shampoo and filmed with high speed what goes on under the surface?
 
Wow, I wish I had known that this was something new, or it might have been the Patterson Effect. Crap, I've been playing with this since I was a kid. It works well with pretty much any viscous liquid in a thin stream. I was showing my daughter this just the other day. It doesn't really have to be onto a hard surface though, I've had it happen when the liquid starts to pile up onto itself as well.
 
I think I might use this for a science activity.

Would the type of shampoo matter? Any way of telling of a certain shampoo won't have shear thinning properties?

Athon
 
Burning curiosity vs. ridiculous cost of my shampoo. Science or vanity. Hmmm.
 
athon said:
I think I might use this for a science activity.

Would the type of shampoo matter? Any way of telling of a certain shampoo won't have shear thinning properties?

Athon
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I've had it work with honey, dish soap, maple syrup, shampoo, and probably others. It's really easy to get it to do this. Dish soap or shampoo is probably your best bet, and if you do it in a clean container, there's no reason you can't reuse it. Try whatever you have and see, basically.
 
It kind of seems like it's bouncing. Like how water splashes but in really slow motion and with much thicker fluid
 
The original paper is Kaye A, Nature, 197, 1001-1002, (1963) in which he describes the effect but offers no explanation of the mechanism.

13 years later Collyer and Fisher provided a possible mechanism, again published in Nature.
Collyer AA, Fisher PJ, Nature, 261, 682-683, (1976).

I imagine any half-decent library could provide access for the interested reader.
 
INRM said:
It kind of seems like it's bouncing. Like how water splashes but in really slow motion and with much thicker fluid
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It does look like it, but if you watch the videos that were posted, they created a model that didn't include the elastic properties of the fluid at all and got the observed behavior (using only "the shear thinning properties of the fluid.") The reason that they both follow the same path is that once the interaction that causes them to move away from the surface does its job, the object follows a simple parabolic arc away from its starting point because of gravity.
 
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