NSF Award
2018403
Complex fluid flows play a critical role in many important areas of society and technology including transportation, energy, defense, and the environment. Examples of complex flow phenomena include flows with chemical reactions, flows involving both liquids and gases, and flows that interact with structures. The proposal will fund the acquisition of an instrument referred to as a particle image velocimeter. A broad portfolio of research projects has been developed to leverage the proposed instrument as well as expertise from a variety of disciplines. Projects will investigate the mechanism and control of destructive combustion instabilities, drag reduction for ships and pipelines using microbubbles, and the conversion of acoustic noise into useful energy, to name a few. These efforts can directly lead to advancements in the efficiency, reliability, and safety of these systems while reducing environmental impacts. The proposed projects enabled by the instrument includes collaborations across disciplines as well as project teams spanning a variety of regional higher-education institutions. Additional broader impacts include use of the instrument in multiple undergraduate and graduate courses, outreach activities including a K-12 summer STEM program for female students and enhanced preparation of undergraduate researchers for graduate study.<br/><br/>The University of St. Thomas proposes an instrument acquisition project to fund a high-speed stereoscopic particle image velocimetry system. The objective is to use the requested system to support research and teaching needs of major faculty users and their collaborators, faculty users at the University of Minnesota and Dunwoody College of Technology, and additional St. Thomas engineering faculty and students. The instrument will enable a broad range of interdisciplinary research integrating fluid dynamics, data science, modeling and simulation, and digital image analysis. A wide range of physical phenomena will be investigated that require detailed 3-D measurements taken at high-speeds to better understand the important details of the flow behavior. Immediate plans include the study of fluid/structure interactions, multiphase flows, acoustic/flow interactions, flow instabilities, and flow transitions. These flows exhibit complexities including competing and coexisting instability mechanisms, phase boundaries, density gradients, and multiscale features in space and time. The instrument will further be used within the curriculum for topics such as fluid mechanics and heat transfer, experimental methods, engineering design, verification and validation of numerical simulations, and big data mining and visualization. Finally, the instrument enables extensive validation of increasingly sophisticated modeling and simulation tools both as a research activity and with industry partnerships.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
