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From Washington Fluids Wiki
Welcome to this page; we intend to create a web knowledge-database of fluids experiments and, particularly, laboratory techniques relating to environmental sciences, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, classical physics and engineering.
There are three principal areas that this site is divided into: research, teaching and tools/techniques. This website stems from 18 years of experience in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at University of Washington. We want to encourage dialogue among the small community of fluids lab people, and the larger teaching- and research community in the environmental sciences. This site utilizes the software developed by the Wikimedia Foundation for the popular Wikipedia website.
By the way, the whole idea of Wikis is developing rapidly, to provide a growing, constantly adapting knowledge base for humanity (note, there are many foreign-language Wikipedias now, correcting the bias that English must rule). A particularly difficult issue is quality control. Some real insight may be found in an article in Atlantic Monthly, August 2006, by Marshall Poe: www.theatlantic.com. In brief, the hopeful ideal is that 'a thousand pairs of eyes', the watching user base, is the quality control, with very little intervention from central administration and no 'boards of experts'. Visit Wikipedia and read about their methods and philosophy.
So please create an account, read the following help document: ReadMe, and contribute in either of two ways: through the Discussion buttons or with a new page, using the Create button on the sidebar. We, the editors, will then try to reorganize new contributions into the flow of the main page and Table of Contents. You may upload images and describe techniques and experiments that can contribute to the sometimes unrecorded literature of fluids lab experiments.
Peter Rhines, Eric Lindahl, Yakov Afanasyev, Alex Mendez
Table of Contents
Teaching: Methods to demonstrate ideas
Research:
Tools and Techniques: The HOWTO of methods and resources.
Overview
Discussions of laboratory physical science eventually lead to Forest Mims and CL Strong who edited The Amateur Scientist in Scientific American. This series, which ran from 1928 through 2001, represented the essence of the laboratory in classical physical science. The word 'amateur' applies to this Wiki in the sense that our scientific ancestor GI Taylor of Cambridge used it, or that Robert Frost in the poem Two Tramps in Mudtime implied it: we are amateurs who do not separate vocation from avocation. The hand-drawn illustrations of Roger Hayward in Amateur Scientist and in Strong's out-of-print book, Procedures in Experimental Physics show a merging of scientific technique and art. Botany is famous for its artistic illustrations, and, really, physics should be too. {The entire series, more than 1000 experiments from 72 years of Amateur Scientist and Strong's book are available on one CD from Surplus Shed; some can be found online at the Society for Amateur Scientists; back issues. Also see an article in eetimes.}
In this section we describe laboratory techniques we have developed in our Seattle lab over the years and invite you to contribute yours. They are hard-won skills; some are simple (mixing melted crayons and candle wax so as to produce neutrally buoyant Lagrangian particles of desired density) and not in themselves 'publishable' while others are more complex and have been published (optical altimetry, ferrofluid models of the spherical rotating Earth).
Laboratory Physical Plant
A good general purpose fluid dynamics lab should have certain amenities. Lab spaces without these will often cause grief in the performance of experiments. For example if the temperature regulation is poor, the glass plate atop an exeriment will spontaneously fog up spoiling a photographic run; a vibrating floor may cause a stable regime to go turbulent; cloudy water from the tap may be unusable. The items below elaborate on our experiences:
- Seismic Stability
- Thermal Stability
- Plumbed in fluids
- Rotating Tables
Materials
- Fluids
- air vs. water
- saline and thermal stratification
- ferrofluid
- Properties
- Preparation
- water handling
- How to siphon
- Metals
- Plastics
- Cements
- Clays
- Forming Methods
- glassware and glass blowing
Forcing
- Electromagnetic forcing
- Convective
- Transducers
- Inertial (move the container)
Flow visualization
- dyes
- powders and crystals
- fluorescent dyes
- pH indicator thymol blue
- dye injectors
- hand-blown glass catheters
- particles
- making wax beads
- polymers
- polystyrene
- glass microspheres
- herring scales, kalliroscope fluid
- altimetric imaging
- refractive index images
Imaging hardware
- By Eye
- By Film Cameras
- By Electronic Cameras
- Lighting
- Background
- Optical Filters
Measurement
- Velocity
- Acceleration
- Rotation
- Pressure
- Force
- Temperature
- Conductivity
- Extinction
- Dielectric Constant
- Density
- Surface Tension
- Dissolved Gas Tension
- Ph+
Numerical Resources
- Controllers, data loggers
- Virtual instruments
- Numerical model
Experiments
- Comparing numerical models with real fluids to improve both-
- Performing real fluid experiments which are intractable numerically-
- Demonstrations of fluid behavior in support of academic programs-
Related Sites
Support Documents
- ReadMe: Support Document for first time users.