Tough Stuff.
My first go around at trying to model and understand fluid processes, I learned a lot about myself, a great deal of practical knowledge, and very little about the nature of turbulence. A sentiment shared by the rest of my cohort - this class was quite difficult. We had almost no basis for which to approach the material besides what we had learned of the Bernoulli equation in introductory physics, and once we had touched on familiar ground we quickly moved away from it. This was an instance of being able to brute force learning, a tactic I try to not often resort too. Requiring long hours of working and reworking problems and approaching concepts from several different angles, fluid transport concepts are definitely rewarding to fully understand.
During my first quarter working at the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds as a research assistant, I was actually able to put the knowledge from this class to use on a project I am working on. Currently I am working to design a custom print core for an ultimate 3d Printer to print fluids, instead of heating solid plastics. This required thinking about how my system would respond to different fluid properties as well as evaluating internal pressures to make sure my system could handle a variety of different printing needs.
One recurring concept that has puzzled me was the fact that turbulence in fluids is almost a complete mystery to the realm of physics. The only way to make any headway into trying to understand situations where the flow was turbulent in nature was to make massive, overarching assumptions to come to very basic conclusions. Thinking back, I believe that this was my first encounter with an "unsolved" problem in science and engineering, a quite interesting one that I hope will be solved within my lifetime.
During my first quarter working at the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds as a research assistant, I was actually able to put the knowledge from this class to use on a project I am working on. Currently I am working to design a custom print core for an ultimate 3d Printer to print fluids, instead of heating solid plastics. This required thinking about how my system would respond to different fluid properties as well as evaluating internal pressures to make sure my system could handle a variety of different printing needs.
One recurring concept that has puzzled me was the fact that turbulence in fluids is almost a complete mystery to the realm of physics. The only way to make any headway into trying to understand situations where the flow was turbulent in nature was to make massive, overarching assumptions to come to very basic conclusions. Thinking back, I believe that this was my first encounter with an "unsolved" problem in science and engineering, a quite interesting one that I hope will be solved within my lifetime.