The Use Of Hands On Table Top Laboratories In Undergraduate Thermal Fluid Science Courses

The laboratory components of two upper level mechanical engineering thermal-fluid science courses at Union College were re-designed to use "table-top" experiments. The table-top lab setups allow the students to work simultaneously in groups of 2 or 3. The advantage of this approach is that the students participate actively in each lab (as opposed to "watch" the labs), they get hands-on experience with the phenomena under study, they control and use the data acquisition system, and the group interaction (between the 4-5 groups) appears to help motivate the students. As part of this redesign we designed and built a set of table-top wind tunnel systems each equipped with instrumentation for measuring flow velocity, pressure and temperature. The purpose of this paper is to describe these systems, to describe three lab exercises that use these systems, and to present some typical results.