Flux-Curl Fluid Simulation with Cyclic Instability

This is a simple fluid simulation with instability caused by amplification. A 2-vector placed at each grid point has a magnitude controlled by local flux, and angle controlled by local curl. Vector magnitude is gradually increased by an amplification factor. As vector magnitude increases, the exponentially-weighted curl term dominates, creating a rapidly-propagating wave of instability. As the curl causes adjacent vectors to rotate out of alignment with one another, flux decreases, returning the system to stability. Ignoring scaling terms, this video shows local divergence plus the logarithm of local curl, which doesn't have physical significance as a quantity but produces a good visualization.

This is not a reaction-diffusion system, in that no diffusion terms are used.

Many of the patterns shown on my YouTube channel are now included in the upcoming Ready 0.7 release, and can be found here:
https://code.google.com/p/reaction-di....

Created using Ready https://code.google.com/p/reaction-di...
Ready VTI file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8jduxw3wqel...

• #science_technology
• #curl
• #flux
• #instability
• #physics_field_of_study