NSF Award
0959915
0959915<br/>Wootton<br/><br/>"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."<br/><br/>An endoscopic particle image velocimetry (PIV) system and multiprocessor computer will be acquired for mechanical and biomedical engineering fluid mechanics research and projects at the Cooper Union. The PIV system is designed for visualizing and measuring two-dimensional velocity and turbulence fields in steady and unsteady flows of gas or liquid, at sample rates up to 15 fields per second, in internal flow devices with restricted optical access. Conventional light sheet optics will be acquired for use in wind tunnels and other optically accessible experiments. The multiprocessor computer is a custom 16-core workstation with 64 GB of RAM, designed for large computational fluid dynamics model simulations. These powerful tools will be used to train masters and undergraduate students in fluid mechanics research using both experimental and computational methods, in a variety of projects, including fluid mechanics of rigid and deformable models of the upper airway in obstructive sleep apnea, fluid mechanics of chronic cyclic hypoxia research equipment, improved in-cylinder flow characteristics in homogeneous charge compression ignition engines to reduce hydrocarbon emissions, and a variety of undergraduate automotive and wind tunnel projects. Undergraduate students will be exposed to PIV in required fluid mechanics and lab courses, and will be able to receive training and apply PIV to research and design projects. Students taking computational fluid dynamics courses will be introduced to parallel processing and have the opportunity to use the multiprocessor workstation during course projects as well as research projects.
