Milk Splashes on a Rubber Membrane

Milk Drops onto a Rubber Membrane
Daniel Beyer

Method:

In this experiment we used the basic setup but placed a rubber membrane stretched across a bowl. We did this to see if a dry elastic surface would create a different splash than a hard surface. We were able to get many photos in this section, but have few showing because in most of the pictures we took there was standing milk on the rubber membrane, making it hard to see the crown very well and also causing it to be very bright. In the shots with a lot of standing milk, we noticed that the crown wasn't much different than those on regular hard surface splashes, and therefore we were only interested in the splashes on the dry rubber membrane. Because of time constraints (and considering we were doing three seperate projects) it was hard to get many on completely dry surfaces, bet we were pleased with what we acheived here.

Our biggest obstacle (other than keeping the surface dry) was keeping the flash off of the membrane, because if the flash ever directly hit the balloon surface the picture would be too bright to make out anything. If you look in the pictures, you may notice that the back half of the membrane is fairly brighter than the front half, and this is because we had to point the flash toward the upper back half of the splash box. In other photos we have posted, you may notice how dark they are, and this is because we struggled to keep the flash steady the entire project. Had we found a way to keep the flash in a good, constant position (Daniel had to hold the unit above the camera the whole time) we could probably get much better photos.

Gallery: