Reflections on Flow Visualization
My apologies for the late post. There’s a lot going on lately.
The flow visualization project was a great experience. It was great to be involved in fully planning out an experiment, building our apparatus, and executing our project. Although we encounter some difficulties (as expected with anything really) I feel like my team gathered some appealing results.
I think that my favorite part of this challenge was when we looked at the first long exposure image from the setup in the wind tunnel. That was when we realized that we were going to be able to collect some worthwhile images and be able to quantify something about the flow. There was definitely concern that our setup was not going to work as planned.
We were very disappointed to find out that the wind tunnel force balance assembly was acting up, and we would not be able to change the angle of attack of the setup (which was a primary part of our original plan). Nonetheless, we were able to image the tip vortex at varying tunnel speeds, although the change in size was likely smaller than what would have been observed by changing the angle of attack.
I must say that 307 has been one of the most useful classes in my professional development as an aspiring engineer. It has definitely shed light on what it means to design, build, implement, troubleshoot, and analyze for a project in a meaningful way. I honestly wish I had experiences like this earlier on in my education, as the skills are invaluable. It seems like this course has gone by in a flash and I definitely want to have more time to put into “real stuff”. I’m looking forward to our last project in the tunnel for the next few weeks.