Engineering

How surface roughness influences the adhesion of soft materials

Adhesive tape or sticky notes are easy to attach to a surface, but are difficult to remove. This phenomenon, known as adhesion hysteresis, can be fundamentally observed in soft, elastic materials: Adhesive contact is formed ...

Engineering

Bubble simulation: Model improves prediction of cavitation nuclei

Small gas bubbles that form and collapse in a liquid—a process known as cavitation—can cause big problems for equipment like ship propellers. Imploding bubbles create noise and vibration, interfering with acoustic sensors, ...

Robotics

Novel robot mimics insects' optics-to-neurons pathway

With a brain the size of a pinhead, insects perform fantastic navigational feats. They avoid obstacles and move through small openings. How do they do this with their limited brain power? Understanding the inner workings ...

Engineering

Disasters at sea trigger ship-safety advances

When one of the world's largest container ships crashed into the bank of the Suez Canal in 2021, a major gateway for global trade became blocked with an estimated $9.6 billion in daily commerce being held up.

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Surface

In mathematics, specifically in topology, a surface is a two-dimensional topological manifold. The most familiar examples are those that arise as the boundaries of solid objects in ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space R3 — for example, the surface of a ball or bagel. On the other hand, there are surfaces which cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space without introducing singularities or intersecting itself — these are the unorientable surfaces.

To say that a surface is "two-dimensional" means that, about each point, there is a coordinate patch on which a two-dimensional coordinate system is defined. For example, the surface of the Earth is (ideally) a two-dimensional sphere, and latitude and longitude provide coordinates on it — except at the International Date Line and the poles, where longitude is undefined. This example illustrates that not all surfaces admits a single coordinate patch. In general, multiple coordinate patches are needed to cover a surface.

Surfaces find application in physics, engineering, computer graphics, and many other disciplines, primarily when they represent the surfaces of physical objects. For example, in analyzing the aerodynamic properties of an airplane, the central consideration is the flow of air along its surface.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA