Surface Tension facts
While investigating facts about Surface Tension Of Water and Surface Tension Formula, I found out little known, but curios details like:
Firefighters use wetting agents to make water more "wet". The chemicals added reduce the surface tension of plain water so it's easier to spread and soak into objects.
how surface tension works?
Firefighters use wetting agents to make water wetter. The chemicals reduce the surface tension of plain water so it’s easier to spread and soak into objects, which is why it’s known as “wet water.”
What surface tension of water?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what surface tension means. Here are 16 of the best facts about Surface Tension Examples and Surface Tension Equation I managed to collect.
what's surface tension?
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Fairyfly's are the smallest insect in the world (.13mm). They can stay underwater for 15 days, but have exit the water by climbing up plant stems that jut out the surface, otherwise they would not be able to break the surface tension of water.
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From 1790s to 1960s 'Shot Towers' were used for the production of small shot. used in firearms & elsewhere. By dropping molten lead from height, usually 40-80m, spherical balls are formed by surface tension. Max size is determined by the distance of the drop. Many Shot Towers remain standing.
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Despite the university having no physics laboratory and only one professor in the discipline, Bohr designed a series of experiments that improved on Lord Rayleigh's model for measuring a liquid's surface tension.
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Lead shot for muskets used to be manufactured by pouring, from a tall tower, fine streams of molten lead which would form spheres due to surface tension
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Helium-4, a helium isotope, exhibits very different properties from helium in the liquid form. At low temperature, it becomes a superfluid, a fluid with no viscocity and no entropy, which means it can move past any surface without any tension, being subject only to its own inertia.
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To investigate the challenge of emergency surgery in deep space, there have been several zero-g surgery experiments. Surgeons carried out operations on anaesthetised rabbits during zero-g parabolic aircraft flights. Surface tension causes blood to adhere to the surface operated on.
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Japanese Yen coins can float on water due to surface tension.
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Geckos use hairs called 'seta' that are so small, intermolecular van der Waals' forces adhere the gecko's feet onto surfaces, requiring no surface tension or moisture.
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All conventional pens and pencils work in space. Ball point pens don't work well upside down on Earth because of gravity. In space, the ink will not fall back away from the nib because surface tension will keep the ink together and flowing.
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The "Cheerios Effect" is when floating objects that don't normally float attract one another (e.g. when breakfast cereal clumps together or clings to the sides of a bowl of milk). This is due to surface tension.
Why surface tension is important?
You can easily fact check why surface tension is zero at critical temperature by examining the linked well-known sources.
Foam in lakes are caused naturally when the surface tension of water is reduced and air is mixed in
There are lakes and rivers on the seafloor that have their own surface tension and waves. They are formed when salt leaches from the seafloor, creating super salinated pools that cannot mix with the surrounding seawater. - source
Lava is not only very viscous, but also has strong surface tension. - source
Shot towers, which were used for making ammunition. Lead would be heated up until molten and dropped through a long, copper sieve where tiny spherical balls form by surface tension and solidified as they fell. The balls would then be caught in a water basin where they’d be appraised.
