I was sitting in the car, watching the raindrops fall…and noticed that drops of water were flying over the wet surface of the hood. My question-are these droplets being repelled by an electrostatic field? I suppose the drops could pick up a negative charge, and if the water surface is also negatively charged, then the droplets would be repelled-explaining the motion I observed.
Anybody know about this phenomena?
You´d need a big fricking electromagnetic field to levitate that many water droplets, I´d guess that what you´re seeing are drops bouncing off the hood.
Did you see individual droplets actually levitating for some time or just a layer of droplets some distance from the surface?
What you were seeing are probably air bubbles that sometimes form when a raindrop hits water. However, your lack of a good description of the phenomenon makes it difficult to say.
Do you mean how the water follows the airstream when the car is in motion? Or are you talking about something happening when you are stopped?
Not air bubbles.
I’ve seen this many times. If you direct a stream of water into a pool of water, at just the right volume / velocity, the stream will break up when it hits the surface, and little balls of water will go skittering across the surface. Some of them can last for quite a while (seconds), before they “pop” and get absorbed into the body of water.
Water surface tension. Until that breaks the droplet remains on its own.
Oh, are you just referring to beading? If so, see surface tension
There was a really cool photo of something like this in Science News last July 28th. Unfortunately, it’s a subscriber-only link. It shows a stream of oil falling into a rotating pan of the same stuff. The stream “bounces” twice, forming a couple of arches like a sea serpent before finally slipping in past the surface tension.
The paper describing it is supposed to be in Physical Review E.
When I read the OP, though, I thought he meant the droplets were floating in air above his hood. I don’t think I’ve seen that, unless the car was moving and they were caught in laminar flow above the turbulent air?