Fluid Mechanics Lab Simulators

When the pandemic disrupted in-person lab courses, I built a set of fluid mechanics simulators based on MSOE's main experiments so the course could still run remotely.

The collection included pressure-loss measurements in pipes and components, pitot-tube velocity profiling, falling-ball viscosity measurements, vortex shedding, and drag force estimation from wake measurements. I intentionally modeled the dynamic fluctuations students normally see in the physical experiments so the simulations would feel less sterile.

Some of the labs were distributed as downloadable executables with MATLAB scripts for live data collection, while the rest were published through a GitHub Pages site so students could run them in a browser.

Even after returning to in-person teaching, other instructors still assign them as homework and lab preparation, which is probably the strongest sign that they solved a real teaching problem.