Capillary action colors calendar in real time

Craft & Design Science
Capillary action colors calendar in real time
ink_calendar_oscar_diaz03.jpg

Artist Oscar Diez created this amazing calendar, made of different types of paper and special inks, which is carefully designed to slowly color in the days of the month by capillary action, in real time, over the course of each month. Via Boing Boing.

6 thoughts on “Capillary action colors calendar in real time

  1. Jeff Epler says:

    In Washburn’s Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washburn%27s_equation) the time for a liquid to penetrate a distance L into a porous material is proportional not to L, but to L². I would expect the dye to take longer to penetrate each successive day’s numerals.

    The equation also includes D, average pore diameter. One way to make this work would be to vary the average pore diameter across the calendar–large at the beginning and small at the end, so that D is proportional to 1/L. You could do this with just two different porosities, changing from mostly one porosity at the start to mostly the other at the end of the calendar.

  2. Sean Michael Ragan says:

    Note that the vast majority of the calendar’s area is below the reservoir of ink, meaning that there’s a siphoning effect going on that makes the system more complex than Washburn’s equation can model by itself.

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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