A colloidal motor driven by surface tension forces is theoretically designed by encapsulating an active Janus particle in a liquid drop which is immiscible in the suspending medium. The Janus particle produces an asymmetric flux of a solute species which induces surface tension gradients along the liquid–liquid interface between the drop and the surrounding fluid. The resulting Marangoni forces at the interface propel the compound drop/Janus particle system. The propulsion speeds of the motor are evaluated for a range of relative sizes and positions of the drop and the particle and across a range of transport properties of the drop and the suspending medium. It is demonstrated that the proposed design can produce higher propulsion velocities than the traditional Janus-particle-based colloidal motors propelled by neutral diffusiophoresis.

A general mixed kinetic-diffusion boundary condition is formulated to account for the out-of-equilibrium kinetics in the Knudsen layer. The mixed boundary condition is used to investigate the problem of quasi-steady evaporation of a droplet in an infinite domain containing inert gases. The widely adopted local thermodynamic equilibrium assumption is found to be the limiting case of infinitely large kinetic Péclet number ${{Pe}_k}$, and it introduces significant error for ${{Pe}_k} \leqslant O(10)$, which corresponds to a typical droplet radius $a$ of a few micrometres or smaller. When compared with experimental data, solutions based on the mixed boundary condition, which take into account the temperature jump across the Knudsen layer, better predict the time evolution of $a$ than the classical $D^2$-law (i.e. $a^2 \propto t$, where $t$ denotes time). In the slow evaporation limit, an analytical solution is obtained by linearising the full formulation about the equilibrium condition, which shows that the $D^2$-law can be recovered only in the large ${{Pe}_k}$ limit. For small ${{Pe}_k}$, where the process is dominated by kinetics, a linear relation, i.e. $a \propto t$, emerges. When the gas phase density approaches the liquid density (e.g. at high-pressure or low-temperature conditions), the increase in the chemical potential of the liquid phase due to the presence of inert gases needs to be accounted for when formulating the mixed boundary condition, an effect largely ignored in the literature so far.

Analysis of satellite altimetry and Argo float data leads Ni et al. (J. Geophys. Res., 125, 2020, e2020JC016479) to argue that mesoscale dipoles are widespread features of the global ocean having a relatively uniform three-structure that can lead to strong vertical exchanges. Almost all the features of the composite dipole they construct can be derived from a model for multipoles in the surface quasi-geostrophic equations for which we present a straightforward novel solution in terms of an explicit linear algebraic eigenvalue problem, allowing simple evaluation of the higher radial modes that appear to be present in the observations and suggesting that mass conservation may explain the observed frontogenetic velocities.

Kirby et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 953, 2022, A39) adapted the two-scale momentum theory (Nishino & Dunstan, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 894, A2) to large finite-sized farms. They demonstrated that analytical estimates agree excellently with large eddy simulations, and that the model provides a good upper limit of the power production for a given array density. Crucially, they introduced the concepts of farm-scale losses, caused by the atmospheric response to the whole farm, and turbine-scale losses, owing to internal flow interactions in the wind farm. These two new theoretical concepts offer a novel way to analyse the performance of extended wind farms. For large offshore wind farms, losses at the wind-farm scale are typically twice as high as at the turbine scale. This demonstrates that there is limited potential for layout optimizations of extended arrays. Instead, optimization strategies should focus on developing methods to increase the energy entrainment into the wind farm. This work provides an exciting roadmap for analysing the effective efficiency of large wind farms.

A multiscale asymptotic theory is formulated for surface gravity waves and currents in finite-depth water with a vegetation canopy that provides a drag force on both flows with known drag coefficients. It assumes that the density is uniform and the depth is uniform pro tem and that the wave frequency is fast compared to the current advective rate. It is a quasi-linear theory in which the wave dynamics is independent of current and drag to leading order but provides perturbative corrections, and in which wave nonlinear interactions are neglected while quadratic wave-averaged wave fluxes and quadratic wave-drag effects are retained. The primary surface wave is modified by drag and current interactions, and the wave-averaged current momentum balance includes a wave-augmented drag force and several vortex forces due to Earth's rotation, current vorticity, Stokes drift and drag-induced wave vorticity. The wave-averaged current equations derived here are a suitable basis for future large-eddy simulation and submesoscale circulation computational models.