Tuesday, 8 July 2014

Art from Vegetable Oil

It sounded a bit unlikely but I tried it anyway and I was surprised by the results. I poured just a couple of drops of  vegetable oil onto a watch glass and added several drops of water. I mixed it up well in order to disperse the oil in the water. I placed the watch glass on a glass slide on the microscope stage to enable easy maneuverability. I used various combinations of Rheinberg  filters above the scope's light source to give different dual colour combinations and tried  40x and then 100x magnification. I used Canon Liveview software to control the camera and take the photos.

Oil and water don't mix because water consists of polar molecules and oil is non polar (no charge) . The water molecules have a slightly positive charge on the double hydrogen atom end and a slightly negative charge on the oxygen end so they attract each other to the exclusion of  the non polar oil atoms which therefore group together in the lowest energy state for their volume ie a sphere. Also, oil is less dense than water so it floats on the top. 

The size of the oil droplets depends on how vigorous the two liquids are mixed together. The more the mixing he smaller the average droplet size.




















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