Critical water tunnel facility upgrade

通过该提案，我们要求为滑铁卢大学（UW）的水隧道设施进行关键的、时间敏感的升级提供资金。该设施建于20世纪60年代，最后一次升级是在20世纪90年代，其性能下降严重阻碍了几个申请人正在进行的研究项目的进展。此外，它最初是为环境流动研究而设计的，运行速度范围较低，不适合许多实际工程应用。申请者在实验流体力学方面有活跃的研究项目，包括与工业伙伴在空气动力学、工业流体力学、生物力学和流体结构相互作用方面的合作。拟议的升级将解决阻碍这些地区当前项目的流动特性差的问题，并将大大增加运行速度范围，扩大设施的能力范围。升级后的设施将是研究流体结构相互作用问题的理想场所，这是申请人共同追求的研究领域。本研究的重点是流体流动的能量收集，流动引起的振动，以及人类语言的流固相互作用。

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.