Development Of “Hands On” Student Experience With Modern Facilities, Measurement Systems, And Uncertainty Analysis In Undergraduate Fluids Engineering Laboratories

Development described of hands-on student experience with modern facilities, measurement systems, and uncertainty analysis in undergraduate fluids engineering laboratories. Classroom and pre-lab lectures and laboratories teach students experimental fluid dynamics (EFD) methodology and uncertainty analysis (UA) procedures following a step-by-step approach, which mirrors the “real-life” EFD process: setup facility; install model; setup equipment; setup data acquisition; perform calibrations; data acquisition, analysis and reduction; and UA, and comparison computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and/or analytical fluid dynamics (AFD) results. Students conduct fluids engineering experiments using tabletop and modern facilities such as pipe stands and wind tunnels and modern measurement systems, including pressure transducers, pitot probes, load cells, and computer data acquisition systems (LabView) and data reduction. Students implement EFD UA for practical engineering experiments. Students analyze and relate EFD results to fluid physics and classroom lectures, including teamwork and presentation of results in written and graphical form. Implementation described based on results for an introductory level fluid mechanics course, which includes complementary CFD laboratories for the same geometries and conditions. The laboratories constitute 1 credit hour of a four credit hour 1 semester course and include tabletop kinematic viscosity experiment focusing on UA procedures and pipe and airfoil experiments focusing on complementary EFD and CFD. The evaluation and research plan (created in collaboration with a third party program evaluation center at the University of Iowa) is described, which focuses on exact descriptions of the implementations, especially as experienced by the students, including preliminary data on immediate student outcomes as documented for Fall 2003. The project is part of a three-year National Science Foundation sponsored Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement Educational Materials Development project with faculty partners from colleges of engineering at