Critical water tunnel facility upgrade

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Through this proposal, we request funds for a critical, time-sensitive upgrade of the water tunnel facility at the University of Waterloo (UW). Constructed in the 1960’s, the facility was last upgraded in the 1990’s, and its degraded performance is significantly hindering the progress of several of the applicants’ ongoing research programs. Additionally, it was originally designed for environmental flow studies, with a low operating velocity range unsuitable for many practical engineering applications. The applicants have active research programs in experimental fluid mechanics, including collaborations with industrial partners in aerodynamics, industrial fluid mechanics, biomechanics, and fluid structure interaction. The proposed upgrades will address the issues of poor flow characteristics that impede current projects in these areas, and will substantially increase the operating velocity range, extending the range of the capabilities of the facility. The upgraded facility will be ideal for studying fluid structure interaction problems - the area of research pursued collaboratively by the applicants. This research focuses on energy harvesting from fluid flows, flow-induced vibrations, and fluid-structure interactions of human speech. The proposed upgrade to the existing water tunnel will also complement the cutting-edge flow measurement equipment available in the applicants’ laboratories, including time-resolved particle image velocimetry, which will allow researchers to gain new insight into the complex non-linear interactions attendant in the aforementioned problems, which have direct practical applications to the design and operation of cylindrical components and structures, small-scale energy harvesting, and vocal folds modelling for individual surgical procedures. The requested equipment will prevent the need to construct a completely new facility, reducing the overall budget by almost an order of magnitude. The infrastructure will be converted into a versatile research facility that will enable the applicants to expand their research programs to produce novel research results and foster collaborative research opportunities with industry for added practical impact. It will immediately support training of four HQP (1 PhD, 2 MASc, and 1 postdoc), and will expand significantly the training base in experimental fluid mechanics at graduate and postdoctoral levels. This is expected to create new training opportunities to four graduate and six undergraduate students per year, who will acquire experimental and analytical skills directly relevant to the analysis of fluid-structure interaction and the associated structural response encountered in most mechanical systems and civil structures, as well as in human body.