Controlling chaotic turbulence to make ’cat-coat’ patterns in fluids

Researchers from TU/e and the University of Chicago discovered how to manipulate turbulent flows to create regular patterns like those seen in the tabby coat pattern of a cat. The new research has been published in Nature. Controlling the chaos of a turbulent flow to make regular patterns sounds like a contradiction in every sense of the word. Turbulent flows are marked by the break-up of large vortices into smaller vortices in a disordered manner. And the patterns that emerge are far from being regular. In collaboration with the University of Chicago, TU/e researchers turned to something called 'odd viscosity' to model this behavior. It took millions of hours of simulations on supercomputers to create astonishingly regular patterns in turbulent flows.