Anyone who has sprinkled water into a hot pan has seen the Leidenfrost effect in action. A thin layer of vapor forms between the super-boiling-point surface and the droplets, causing them to levitate and skid across the pan (see Physics Today, June 2006, page 17). Now Nicolas Vandewalle, Stéphane Dorbolo, and Baptiste Darbois Texier at the University of Liège in Belgium have demonstrated that an analogous phenomenon can occur when solids sit atop a surface heated beyond their melting point. Using a Petri dish as a mold, the researchers created disks of water ice. They then placed a disk on a heated aluminum plate. By using a video camera to track the motion of a black foam ellipse placed atop the ice disk, the researchers were able to analyze the disk’s translation and rotation. At a range of plate temperatures between 4 °C and 35 °C Vandewalle’s team...
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1 January 2017
January 01 2017