Session E18: Flow Visualization

Seminar in Flow Visualization at Lafayette College: Variations on the Hertzberg Effect

Flow visualization reveals an invisible world of fluid dynamics, blending scientific investigation and artistic exploration. ~The resulting images have inspired, and in some cases themselves become appreciated as, art. At Lafayette College, a sophomore-level seminar in \textit{The Art and Science of Flow Visualization} exposes students to these techniques and the science of fluid mechanics, and to the photographic methods needed to create effective images that are successful both scientifically and artistically. Unlike other courses in flow visualization, this course assumes no a priori familiarity with fluid flow or with photography. The fundamentals of both are taught and practiced in a studio setting. Students are engaged in an interdisciplinary discourse about fluids and physics, photography, scientific ethics, and historical societal responses to science and art. Relevant texts from several disciplines are read, discussed, and responded to in student writing. This seminar approach makes flow visualization and fluid dynamics a natural part of a liberal education. The development, implementation, and assessment of this team-taught course at Lafayette College will be discussed.   

Student designed experiments to learn fluids

Lasers and high speed cameras are a wonderful tool to visualize the very complex behavior of fluids, and to help students grasp concepts like turbulence, surface tension and vorticity. In this work we present experiments done by physics students in their senior year at the School of Science of the National University of Mexico as a final project in the continuum mechanics course. Every semester, the students make an oral presentation of their work and videos and images are kept in the web page ``\underline {Pasi\'{o}n por los Fluidos}''.   

Designing and Creating a Set of New Lab Experiments for a Traditional Fluid Mechanics Course in Civil Engineering

Many fluids lab facilities and their associated student experiences were built back in the 1960-1970 time frames. They typically consisted of large facilities that included wind tunnels, flumes, wet wells, pump stations, etc. Today these labs are physically and pedagogically out dated and the need for lab space is forcing the closing of large scale labs. This is the same basic problem within the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Thus we have replaced all the old equipment and lab experiences with small bench top experiments with a focus on applying the large body of knowledge associate with better student learning experiences. This paper will describe the concepts behind the design of the new experiments and the learning improvements discovered as a result of moving from a few large experiments to a larger number of smaller scale experiments.   

That is Cool: the Nature Of Aesthetics in Fluid Physics

Aesthetics has historically been defined as the study of beauty and thus as a metric of art. More recently, psychologists are using the term to describe a spectrum of responses from ``I hate it'' to ``I love it.'' In the context of fluid physics, what is beautiful? What elicits a ``Wow! Awesome! Cool!'' response versus a snore? Can we use aesthetics to deepen or change students' or the public's perceptions of physics and/or the world around them? For example, students seem to appreciate the aesthetics of destruction: environmental fluid dynamics such as storms, tornadoes, floods and wildfires are often responsible for massive destruction, yet humans draw pleasure from watching such physics and the attendant destruction from a safe distance. Can this voyeurism be turned to our advantage in communicating science? Observations of student and Facebook Flow Visualization group choices for fluid physics that draw a positive aesthetic response are sorted into empirical categories; the aesthetics of beauty, power, destruction, and oddness. Each aesthetic will be illustrated with examples drawn from flow visualizations from both the Flow Visualization course (MCEN 4151) taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and sources on the web.   

F*** Yeah Fluid Dynamics: Lessons from online outreach

The fluid dynamics education outreach blog FYFD features photos, videos, and research along with concise, accessible explanations of phenomena every weekday. Over the past three years, the blog has attracted an audience of roughly 200,000 online followers. Reader survey results indicate that over half of the blog's audience works or studies in non-fluids fields. Twenty-nine percent of all survey respondents indicate that FYFD has been a positive influence on their desire to pursue fluid dynamics in their education or career. Of these positively influenced readers, over two-thirds have high-school or undergraduate-level education, indicating a significant audience of potential future fluid dynamicists. This talk will utilize a mixture of reader metrics, web analytics, and anecdotal evidence to discuss what makes science outreach successful and how we, as a community, can benefit from promoting fluid dynamics to a wider audience. \textit{http://tinyurl.com/azjjgj2}   

Visualization of Tensor Quantities Used in Computational Turbulent Combustion

Simulation and modeling of turbulent flow, and of turbulent reacting flow in particular, involves solving for and analyzing time-dependent and spatially dense tensor quantities, such as turbulent stress tensors. The interactive visual exploration of these tensor quantities can effectively steer the computational modeling of combustion systems. In this work we present an integrated, hybrid tensor visualization tool. Volume renderings of the 3D quantities reveal the structure of the dataset, allowing users to identify regions of interest. The regions of interest can then be further explored using the 2D glyph-based representations. Finally, streamlines are also provided to help reveal the structure of the flow through the region of interest. In order to facilitate time-space analysis, we provide a small-multiples interface: users can compare thumbnail, low-resolution representations of different time steps and then focus on one time step to view in detail. We demonstrate our application on several turbulent configurations, and show this approach can successfully capture and highlight numerical artifacts in the underlying computational model. \\[4pt] Corresponding Author: T. Luciani, Tel: (412) 624-8460. Fax: (412) 624-8854. E-mail: tbl8@cs.pitt.edu.