Friday 8 February 2019

water - Are raindrops actually "shaped like tears" when they fall?


Raindrops are always pictured like this, people imagine they have this shape when they fall, but is this true? Doesn't this shape create too much drag? What shape do they really have? It would also be nice to know how is the actual shape formed regarding the flow of air.


Common representation of raindrop



Answer



They can sometimes have this shape as they stretch downward from a faucet, as seen in this video, however, surface tension usually pulls the droplet into a roughly-spherical package. The reasons that raindrops have "streaky" trajectories in photographs is not that the raindrops are distended by air resistance, but rather that the short exposure time of the camera is still long enough that the raindrop moves a surprisingly large distance in that small time, and each point that it appears gets partially exposed.



As they hit terminal velocity the force against the bottom is large enough that they have to have a cross-section which looks a little more like a "bean": the side facing "downward" gets flattened by the wind resistance and eventually the center can even be pushed upwards into the droplet; the trailing edge retains its "bulge" upwards. See e.g. this video.


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