PROPOSAL NO.: CTS-0645836/0645846 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS: C. ROWLEY / C. ROGERS INSTITUTION: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY / TUFTS UNIVERSITY
Interactive Undergraduate Fluid Dynamics
This grant will provide partial assistance for an effort to build a state-of-the-art toolset that will allow faculty to quickly and easily integrate hands-on experimentation and analysis into the fluid mechanics classroom and curriculum. The investigators will bring together a group of dedicated faculty and researchers in a series of two workshops to help develop this capability. They will host two 2-day workshops, one year apart, for 10-15 participants. In the first workshop they will lay down the vision of the toolset, develop the key milestones, and assign the tasks required to bring the development to closure. In the second workshop, they will bring together all the completed tools and develop a method of sustaining and growing the toolset. This toolset will be a combination of a gallery of experiments, accompanying simulations, and a selection of suggested sensors and data acquisition and analysis tools. In the final toolset, they will have all the pieces needed to conduct quantitative experiments, develop analytical models based on physics, and enable a quantitative comparison between simulation and experiment. The intellectual merit of this approach is to promote hands-on learning in the college classroom through the development of simple experiments and accompanying simulation tools. Bringing together the "best and brightest" of the fluid mechanics faculty across the country, will provide an opportunity to capture a broad range of innovative experiments and analysis. The broader impact of the proposed work is to change the way fluid mechanics is taught - from an engineering science course with extensive mathematics problem solving (using grossly simplified problems) to an engineering course with students modeling and simplifying the problems themselves. The eFluids portal will be used as a dissemination tool - this website reaches over 1,000 fluid mechanics faculty with over 25,000 monthly visits and over 5,000,000.
