A Laminar Flow Facility with Laser-based Visualization for Enhancing Undergraduate Fluid Mechanics Instruction

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Discipline: Engineering-Other (59)This project involves the development of a laminar flow facility to enhance conceptual understanding in the undergraduate fluid mechanics curriculum at the University of Colorado. The facility includes a laser-based flow visualization system, enabling students to directly visualize basic and complex flow phenomena that are typically difficult to observe. The flow facility and the visualization system are being adapted from facilities and techniques that were piloted as educational tools at Stanford University. Existing facilities in the PI's teaching laboratory enable students to study turbulent flow; the new flow facility is designed to produce laminar and transitional flows. Students can visualize and quantify aspects of laminar and transitional jets, boundary layers, and flows past obstacles (including unsteady wakes). An Engineering Assessment Specialist at the University of Colorado is involved with an assessment of the effectiveness of the facility as a learning tool. Assessment tools include surveys, open-ended interviews, written tests, and course evaluations. The equipment developed with this grant is being used to develop multi-media educational content for National dissemination in two NSF-sponsored activities: the TeachEngineering digital library (intended for K-12 education) and the Multi-Media Fluid Mechanics CD-ROM series (intended for undergraduate education).