The team went to the lab with some lighting equipment
The team went in to test the viability of streamers as a flow visualization method. As a single, connected piece of material, a streamer did not give smooth and accurate portrayals of flow. Furthermore, it was difficult to photograph the streamers due to their erratic movement.
three streamer set up, gives an idea of how the flow looks | One streamer, first the flow pretty well, all things considered |
The team went to the lab armed with a bigger smoke generator. The resulting stream was much stronger.
As the smoke bends according to obstacles, it remains clearly visible. | The smoke is entered slowly, but accelerates according to the air flow around it. |
It was difficult to seal the very hot opening of the smoke machine. | Tubes present an easy answer to smoke delivery. |
We went into the lab on 2/23/2012 Tried out the oil drop generator to see if the correspondence of inlet to test section is roughly 1 to 1. It basically is. The difference in side to side seems more dramatic in the test section.
Here are some pictures of the PIV system in action:
First image. | Second image, taken quickly after the first image. | Third image, taken quickly after the second image. |
These successive images were used to generate a vector field for velocity.
A vector field for the droplets of oil. The strange behavior on the left side of this diagram is useless data. |
The following are some tools we utilized.