Session: 11.1.1 - Advances in Fluids Engineering Education I

Paper Number: 157876

157876 - The Fluids Mechanics of Art: A Student-Centered Laboratory to Bring Fluid Instabilities to Life 

Abstract: 

Fluid mechanics is often considered by students to be a difficult course, owing in part to its heavy reliance on advanced mathematics. However, despite the challenge this sequence of courses presents for students, it also holds a great deal of beauty and intrigue. To this end, a course unit and imbedded laboratory on fluid instabilities was developed to connect the challenge of course subject matter with a tangible representation of its beauty. This unit was contained within one class period and was carried out as a full group, rather than in smaller lab groups. The first three quarters of the class was spent discussing fluid instabilities—ranging from von Karman vortex street shedding to Rayleigh—Plateau instability—and outlining the important ways in which fluid instabilities impact engineering designs and decisions. Then, the students were guided through a perturbation analysis of the Rayleigh—Taylor instability to arrive at the quantitative equation predicting flow instability, which features the Atwood number. Following this, students put theory to test by creating paintings driven entirely by fluid instability. In particular, students used two fluids (paint) of differing density and pigmentation to generate a visually appealing Rayleigh—Taylor instabilities. They were also tasked with selecting their paint dilutions in order to achieve differing Atwood numbers to compare the resulting visualizations. We found that this laboratory was successful in not only fostering excitement and connection with course content, but also served as a proxy for community outreach as students were enthusiastic to share their paintings and discussed fluid instabilities and the lab with their family and friends (an unexpected, but pleasantly surprising outcome!).

Presenting Author: Sarah Beetham Oakland University

Presenting Author Biography: Sarah Beetham is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University, a role she began in Fall of 2021. She completed her PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Scientific Computing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2021 and is the PI of the "Complex Fluids and Modeling Group", which computationally studies and models complex flows of great societal interest--such as the settling behavior of pyroclastic density currents (the gas-solid flow following the collapse of a volcanic column) and the upgrading of agricultural waste into renewable biofuels.