Mayonnaise’s texture evokes love and loathing. Both manner, it’s good for physics experiments.
The basic condiment is helpful for understanding how supplies behave, not solely when smeared on sandwiches or plopped in potato salads, but additionally when deployed in nuclear fusion experiments. Mechanical engineer Arindam Banerjee of Lehigh College in Bethlehem, Pa., and colleagues are finding out phenomena that happen in each mayonnaise and in fusion experiments.
Mayonnaise’s conduct sits on the border between elastic and plastic. If jiggled gently, it returns to its authentic form. That’s elastic conduct. However fling it forcefully and it goes plastic, which means it modifications form completely or breaks aside.
This elastic-to-plastic transition may happen in experiments that use lasers to kick off nuclear fusion. In such experiments, lasers blast a steel capsule containing the gasoline, raising pressures and temperatures so excessive that atomic nuclei within the gasoline fuse collectively, releasing power (SN: 2/16/24). Scientists hope to finally use nuclear fusion as a supply of energy.
But it surely’s troublesome to review how supplies behave beneath the acute situations required for fusion. So of their newest experiment, the scientists checked out how mayo combined with a gasoline — air — as they rotated a wheel that they’d dolloped the mayonnaise into. The centrifugal power of the spinning wheel accelerated the mayo into the gasoline.
After the wheel stopped spinning, the scientists noticed whether or not the glob returned to its authentic form, modified form or broke aside. This decided the border between the elastic and plastic behavior, they reported within the Could Bodily Overview E.
The mayo and air are akin to the molten steel of a fusion gasoline capsule and the gasoline it comprises. The molten capsule has some properties of a strong — like gloopy mayo, it doesn’t movement by itself — however it may possibly break aside beneath sufficient power. If the steel turns into plastic earlier than fusion happens, the gasoline might escape, spoiling the fusion try.
Working with mayo does have one disadvantage. If you present up within the grocery store checkout line with 48 containers of mayo, you’re certain to draw consideration. “We typically get numerous questions from the grocery shops,” Banerjee says, “why we’re shopping for that a lot mayonnaise.”
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