A lack of lab experiences during the COVID pandemic meant that some colleges and universities were forced to cancel lab-based courses. In the summer leading up to the first offering of Fluid Mechanics while fully remote, I developed lab simulators based on MSOE’s main Fluid Mechanics lab experiments in Unity 3D and C#. They included pressure gauges for calculating losses in pipes and components, using a pitot-tube to determine a velocity profile in a circular duct, dropping ball bearings through fluids to determine viscosity, vortex shedding from flow around a cylinder, and drag force determination by measuring air velocity in an object’s wake. The behavior in each simulator recreates dynamic fluctuations seen in each lab experiment. The vortex shedding lab and drag force lab were available as a downloadable executable and accompanied by a MATLAB script for real-time data collection. The remaining labs are available through a webpage hosted on Github.io. Even after a return to in-person learning, they are still assigned by other instructors as homework assignments and lab prep.

https://njpatter.github.io/FluidMechanicsExperiments/

Software used: Unity, MATLAB
Languages used: C#, MATLAB