Take a look back at some of the outstanding papers published in PR Fluids in 2024 as well highlights from our Journal Club, the APS DFD award-winning posters and videos, and Frenkiel Award winners. (Music from #Uppbeat : License code: POH6OBESMHQOEGJP)

Mucus films cover lung airways, but when do they block them? Beyond thickness and volume, intermediate films develop humps whose sliding and nonlinear growth can robustly form plugs, independent of gravity and ciliary transport. Read more at

🗓️ From the August issue. (1) (2) (3) (4) These and all of the articles published in PRFluids during the last month are now available at

Understanding internal wave turbulence is crucial for refining ocean climate models. Large-scale 3D experiments reveal clear power laws in the energy spectra, but it remains to be seen whether these fall within the weakly nonlinear wave turbulence regime.

Passive scalars in 2D turbulence display highly intermittent statistical properties, but a hidden symmetry provides a powerful tool to explain their anomalous scaling. Recent simulations show this symmetry restores scale invariance. Read more at

Viscoelastic inertialess channel flows exhibit stochastic resonance. Controlled by the ratio of elastic stress to relaxation and the perturbation strength, stochastic resonance occurs downstream and acts as a route to sustained chaos after instability.

Under compression, particle rafts behave like elastic sheets, but may fail and expel single particles. By incorporating contact line dynamics, a new model links the microscopic particle behavior to the emergent collective properties of the raft.

📢 PRFluids Editors' suggestion: How do active and passive fluids interact? When confined, the stability of a passive droplet surrounded by an active fluid (and vice versa) is governed by the competition of capillary, active, elastic, and viscous stresses.

To bloom, phytoplankton must cross stratified shear layers. Simulations show that different types of instability affect scalar fluxes and mixing, accelerating phytoplankton growth, especially when physical and biological timescales match. Read more at

📢 PRFluids Editors' suggestion: Drops can spontaneously start rotating in a strong enough electric field. When the drop viscosity is reduced, a bistability emerges, along with the formation of charge-density blowups driven by surface convection.

Why do Lagrangian particles in turbulence separate faster backward in time than forward? In a new Letter, @ronshnapp shows this irreversibility is driven by how the particles' velocities align with the separation vector, rather than their speed.

How well can we predict the weather?.Forecasts have improved since Richardson and Lorenz, but predicting beyond a few days remains a challenge. An invited article explores tools from statistical physics to machine learning to push predictability further.

📢 PRFluids Editors' suggestion: A new data-driven method simultaneously infers flow fields and obstacle shapes from sparse measurements in steady-state supersonic flows. By optimizing a discrete loss with JAX-Fluids, it achieves accurate, robust results.

The excitation of multiple modes in the shape oscillations of an air bubble in water resulting from coalescence can be probed using magnetic levitation. While the bubble shape agrees with theory, multimode coupling greatly affects its frequency response.

Temporal resolution of turbulent flow fields can be enhanced with a new model-based approach: projecting the Navier-Stokes equations onto a low-dimensional POD space and integrating them in time enables reconstruction of flow dynamics from sparse PIV data.

📢 PRFluids Editors' suggestion: When coughing or sneezing, mucus forms bag-like structures that break into droplets. Experiments and simulations show that viscoelasticity makes these bags larger and thinner, which reduces the droplet size upon rupture.

From microalgae to mouse embryos, cilia perform vital roles: swimming, feeding, pumping, and sensing. This invited article explores how cilia generate flow, highlighting their diverse functions and the valuable insights fluid dynamics can offer to biology.

Active particles in a nematic liquid crystal buckle beyond a critical activity, but unlike in isotropic fluids, fluid elasticity stabilizes them into steady flows. If the particles are motile, they can even surf along their self-generated bends. Read more:

A splitter plate on the windward side of a cylinder can amplify, rather than suppress, rotational vibrations. Simulations by @ak_pandey94 & @R_Bhardwaj_IITB at low Reynolds numbers show regimes from vortex-driven large-amplitude oscillations to chaos. 🔗

🗓️ From the July issue.(1) (2) (3) (4) These papers, along with all others published in Phys. Rev. Fluids last month, are available at #fluiddynamics

Flow visualization often relies on synthetic particles like glass microbeads, but biodegradable starch particles from plants offer a safer, sustainable, and cost-effective alternative that has been successfully tested with foils, jellyfish, & brine shrimp!.