Candace Wark, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and her art colleague Shirley Nannini created stunning photographs of air flow using a wind tunnel.
In the article Airflow Art, Koren Wetmore of Illinois Tech Magazine, writes
„Blending science and art, the images reveal the beauty of airflow patterns captured using smoke, light, and colored filters. To visualize the movement of invisible air, Wark and Nannini introduce smoke into the wind tunnel by coating a wire with oil and running an electric current through it. As the oil burns, the smoke gets carried by the air flowing through the tunnel. It passes around and over objects placed in the tunnel, such as tennis balls or flat plates, and then the women photograph the patterns produced downstream. The images’ brilliant colors arise from filters placed over the lights used to illuminate the smoke.
“We work with the lighting, the speed, and various conditions in the wind tunnel until we get these images that people really respond to. For 25 years I’ve been doing scientific photography of flow patterns and they’ve always looked beautiful to me, but until Shirley, I had never thought of them as art.”
Read the full article here: https://magazine.iit.edu/summer-2015/airflow-art