Showing posts with label Fluid Dynamics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fluid Dynamics. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

I'm a Nerd/Wedding - Part 3

I will include today’s "Wedding/Honeymoon Photo of the Day", but I have to share a story from last night . Late last night I was working on a manuscript and it was a little hot in my office area so I had the fan on. The fan was positioned such that it blew across the front of the window blinds. As a result, the blinds oscillated back and forth. I stared at it for a bit and pictured the turbulent structures that were rolling across the front of the blinds causing the oscillations and thought to myself “hey Brian I bet you can determine the size of your fan simply by looking at the blinds.” I first estimated the frequency by looking at a single blind and doing “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi” – the oscillations were at ~1.5 Hz. Next I needed to get a convection velocity so I estimated a foot of blinds and estimated the time it took for the wave front to get from the start to the finish – convection velocity was ~1 ft/s. Thus the size of my fan should be approximately 8 in (i.e. {12 in/s}/{1.5 1/s}= 8 in). I busted out my ruler to find that my fan diameter is more like 9.5 in…oh but wait. There is a ring around the outer edge that would break up that large of structures and what was its diameter…oh that’s right…8 inches. And that is how you a fluids nerd spends his nights.

And now for the "Wedding/Honeymoon Photo of the Day"…

The view from our sunset dinner on the beach.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Colorful Fluid Dynamics



Video by Sherry Bian/University of Michigan

It was time to update my blog and I figured I would post something that isn't the Olympics (though there is more coming from on them...still awesome). After getting an email about a website that stories videos of fluid flows I got thinking of Sherry's great video of a driven cavity flow. This video really is pretty and scores one for experimental fluid mechanics. To date the pretty pictures and videos have been completely dominated by the computational fluid dynamics community, but Sherry scored one for us experimental folks. Above is the video and below is a picture to help explain what is going on in the video. Basically in the picture below everything that is white is water (that is slowly getting faster and faster in the video) and the non-white is Sherry's model that is not moving.