NSF Award
2018150
This NSF Major Research Instrumentation award will support the acquisition of a Phantom VEO 640L high-speed camera which is a critical research instrument toward cutting-edge research and education across campus at Western New England University (WNE), particularly within the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. The speed, resolution, and memory of this camera will enable researchers at WNE to conduct pioneering research in the areas of energy-thermo-fluids, material science, and biomedical engineering. WNE is a primarily undergraduate institution, with a high proportion of first-generation, minority, and non-traditional students. This project will provide research experiences to undergraduates and will open doors for additional research opportunities thereafter, especially for women and minorities. The proposed equipment will enhance WNE's engineering curriculum as undergraduate research activities are integrated in senior design projects. In addition, it will provide research training opportunities for students who will be involved in the proposed research activities. Moreover, the proposed work will increase partnership between academia and industry.<br/><br/>The high-speed camera will be used to advance knowledge in transport phenomena in proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, shear stress distribution of a mechanical pulsating jet, nanomanufacturing of silica-coated nanoparticles, and diagnostic tests for neglected infectious disease. The studies on PEM fuel cells transport phenomena will include; (i) liquid water droplet deformation and removal on the surface of the gas diffusion layer and under the influence of acoustic pressure waves, (ii) variation of liquid-gas two-phase flow pressure drop in PEM fuel cell flow channel during emergence and growth of liquid water droplets, (iii) deformation of liquid water droplet under mechanical vibrations in PEM fuel cells, and (iv) destabilized capillary-scale two-phase flow in microchannels. All of these phenomena occur in orders of milliseconds and therefore, studying them will require high-speed imaging. The shear stress distribution of a mechanical pulsating jet will be investigated by measuring the spatial and temporal shear stress distribution on a flat surface at various Reynolds numbers, stand-off distances, pulsating frequencies and nozzle exit speeds. The findings will be used to further improve the performance of the impinging jet for various applications and to validate numerous numerical studies on this topic. The high-speed camera will also be used to study the capillary fluid instabilities during Nanomanfucaturing of silica-coated nanoparticles using Electrospraying, which holds great promise to solve the long-standing scalability issue in manufacturing of advanced structured nanomaterials. In the Department of Biomedical Engineering, microfluidic flows will be studied to achieve enhanced sample preparation performance in diagnostic tests for neglected infectious diseases. The results obtained in this study can be a transformational factor for this particular application as well as across a number of point-of-care microfluidic platforms for use in low-resource environments.<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.
