Hands-On Student Experience With Complementary CFD Educational Interface and EFD and Uncertainty Analysis for Introductory Fluid Mechanics

Development, implementation, and evaluation are described of hands-on student experience with complementary CFD educational interface and EFD and uncertainty analysis (UA) for introductory fluid mechanics course and laboratory at The University of Iowa, as part of a three-year National Science Foundation sponsored Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement - Educational Materials Development project. The CFD educational interface is developed in collaboration with faculty partners from Iowa State, Cornell and Howard universities along with industrial partner FLUENT Inc. and designed to teach CFD methodology and procedures through interactive implementation that automates the “CFD process” following a step-by-step approach. Predefined active options for students’ exercises use a hierarchical system both for introductory and advanced levels and encourages individual investigation and learning. Ideally, transition for students would be easy from advanced level to using FLUENT or other industrial CFD code directly. Generalizations of CFD templates for pipe, nozzle, and airfoil flows facilitate their use at different universities with different applications, conditions, and exercise notes. Complementary EFD laboratories are also developed. Classroom and pre-lab lectures and laboratories teach students EFD methodology and UA procedures following a step-by-step approach, which mirrors the “real-life” EFD process. Students use tabletop and modern facilities such as pipe stands and wind tunnels and modern measurement systems, including pressure transducers, pitot probes, load cells, and computer data acquisition systems (Labview) and data reduction. Students implement EFD UA and use EFD data for validation of CFD and AFD results. Students analyze and relate EFD results to fluid physics and classroom lectures. The laboratories constitute 1 credit hour of a four credit hour 1 semester course and include tabletop kinematic viscosity experiment focusing on UA procedures and pipe and airfoil experiments focusing on complementary EFD and CFD for the same geometries and conditions. The evaluation and research plan (created in collaboration with a third party program evaluation center at the University of Iowa), focuses on exact descriptions of the implementations, especially as experienced by the students. Also discussed are conclusions and future work.