CAFE4DM exhibits at UoM Community Festival 2018
20 June 2018
On Saturday 16 June members of the CAFE4DM project attended The University of Manchester’s Community Festival introducing the general public to the wonders of “Ooblek”.
The University of Manchester's Community Festival is a free day event, enabling local friends and neighbours within the Manchester community to visit and experience what the University does through a variety of hands-on, exciting activities.
CAFE4DM attended the festival as part of the project’s commitment to outreach. Our activity focused on "Ooblek", a mixture of cornflour and water, demonstrating its properties as a non-Newtonian fluid. The focus on non-Newtonian fluids is highly relevant to the project given the presence of these fluids within Unilever formulations and the challenges these fluids present when mixing, given that their viscosity changes with pressure.
The properties of “Ooblek” were demonstrated through various guises including walking across the Ooblek, dropping eggs covered in Ooblek to show they wouldn’t crack and making Ooblek “dance” in response to the pressure of sound waves from a speaker. The primary audience was children between 4-10 years old and as a result, the messiness of the experiment was very popular. Over the day we saw approximately 500 children with their parents in tow and used over 10kg of cornflour!