Oxford Mathematicians Dominic Vella and Finn Box together with colleague Alfonso Castrejón-Pita from Engineering Science in Oxford and Maxime Inizan from MIT have won the annual video competition run by the UK Fluids Network. Here they describe their work and the film.
"We have been studying the wrinkling patterns formed by very thin elastic sheets floating on liquid interfaces to better understand the geometry and mechanics at play. However, to date most interest has focussed on the static properties of these wrinkle patterns: what happens when you gently poke the skin of custard? Here we explore how things change when we are less careful and drop a sphere onto such a film. This shows that the dynamics of this process are different both to normal static wrinkling and to what happens when a stone is dropped into a pond."
