THE SCIENCE AND ART OF FLUID MECHANICS EXPERIMENTATION (ELECTRONIC LECTURES ON ME332 FLUID MECHANICS LABORATORY)

Mihir Sen Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 December 27, 2002

Contents
Preface Welcome The laboratory Design of the experiments A theoretician looks at the Fluids Laboratory Limitations in our knowledge and methods Goodbye 3 5 9 14 21 27 32

Preface
Spring, 1999. These are electronic lectures1 for ME332 Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, a course typically taken by juniors. The laboratory nature of the course means that you, the students, learn mainly by doing, and I would prefer that you spend the most productive time of the day working in the laboratory, discussing with your peers, analyzing your data, or writing the report. But, in being engaged in these essential day-to-day activities, there is a danger that you may miss the bigger picture and not really understand why you are taking this course in the rst place, what relation it has to the professional engineers task, or what you are supposed to be learning. Since classroom lectures would mean additional time that the average student just does not have, these electronic lectures are a substitute. They have the main advantage that they can be read in a more leisurely fashion and in a more relaxed frame of mind; you can wait till your more urgent tasks are done. The purpose of these lectures is not to discuss specic experiments; the Notes are meant for that. They are not intended to be a substitute for a textbook either. Rather, they are designed to provide you the tools for the interpretation of experimental results. Though in this sense they may help you with the reports, they are not meant to have a direct relation with the actual experiments that you will do, but will provide an overall philosophical umbrella you will be working under. The chapters will be written as the semester goes along, much in the manner of a newspaper or magazine column. Since my intention is to substitute actual lectures, I hope you will nd the writing style to be informal. The lectures will be placed on
1 The word lecture is used in its older sense; it comes from the Latin legere which means to read, but has now more commonly come to mean a discourse.

the Web for you to access from your dorm room or any other place where there is a computer with browser. It will be updated to grow as the chapters are written, and will ultimately contain all the lectures. One of the advantages of the written word is that you may go back and re-read whatever catches your eye. It often happens that with time a paragraph or phrase takes on a dierent meaning. Another is that I can request colleagues on the faculty for their input without making intolerable demands on their schedules. I have done so, and from time to time you will nd a guest lecture by someone else on some aspect of the subject that they are interested in. I thank them for their contributions. You will notice that though we share a common interest in uid mechanics and agree on most of the technical details, our overall perspectives may dier. We are all involved in uid mechanics, but each is on a dierent path. If you nd errors in the text, or would like to discuss some issues that have been raised, please feel free to do so. An e-mail or a personal visit is always welcome. Mihir Sen

Copyright c by M. Sen, 1999

Welcome
Spring, 1999. A belated welcome to ME332 Fluid Mechanics Laboratory and this semester. As classes begin, you have many questions about how it will turn out, whether it will be a lot or work or dicult. These are legitimate questions from your perspective, but I have no concrete answers to give you. Moreover, reducing the acquisition of knowledge and skills to a certain number of hours spent per week is not the place to begin the discussion, I feel. The place I should start, perhaps, is by explaining what I feel this course should give you. If you know what it is you are supposed to be learning, you may be better able to allocate your time and be more ecient in your learning. First, why is uid mechanics included in a mechanical engineering curriculum? The answer to this is quite simple: it is part and parcel of what people expect of mechanical engineering and mechanical engineers. There was a time, maybe several decades ago, when all engineers took all the basic engineering sciences like thermodynamics, electrical technology, metallurgy, and sometimes even uid mechanics. Over the last twenty years the curriculum has gradually been narrowed and more focused and few engineering disciplines require it now, among those being mechanical, civil, chemical and aerospace engineering, though perhaps under dierent names. There are a number of reasons for that, not the least of which is the explosion in knowledge. It is obvious that as time goes on, the amount of knowledge, if one could quantify it (computer scientists like to use bits, but it seems to me to be an overly simplied unit for this purpose) one must nd that it can only grow with each generation. True some skills are lost as artisans pass away and few can, for example, make clay pottery as well as our ancestors did. But knowledge, as represented by facts and gures, must 5

be an integral in time up to the current moment. I have often wondered what the mechanical engineering curriculum will look like in a hundred years. The only thing I can be sure of is that it will look nothing like what it is today. For instance, take a look at what it was a hundred years ago (at Notre Dame we celebrated 100 years of mechanical engineering a decade or so ago). Geometry, mensuration, trigonometry and surveying gured among the advanced mathematical topics that were covered. And for good reason; that was what the engineer would actually use. Fluid mechanics was also taught, but was very empirical. There were many rules of thumb given and practical advice imparted. The twentieth century has been a technological century; and that has aected the engineering curriculum greatly. It was recognized, maybe about fty years ago, that teaching only what the student would immediately use upon graduation was short-sighted; there had to be a way of teaching for the future. From this evolved an emphasis on the engineering sciences, like the ones that were mentioned before. The logic was that with the basic engineering sciences in hand, one could deal with whatever the future would bring; though the applications change, the laws of thermodynamics, for example, are immutable and the machines of the future would have to satisfy them. Of course, this was not satisfactory to all. Engineering technology was spun o as a separate degree program in many schools to prepare students who wanted to work with the technology of the day. Also, shouldnt engineers also be able to work with current technology? In any case, how do you design a machine knowing only Newtons laws and the laws of thermodynamics? Surely you must be taught how to apply them. As a result, it seems to me, the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. You are in the middle of a period of change, but then, isnt any generation? The bottom line is that, at the moment, uid mechanics is still part of the thermal sciences as taught to mechanical and other engineers. Now the issue of focused learning vs. a broad education. Why do you need to learn uid mechanics when it is entirely possible that you may pass your entire working life without using it. On the one extreme, it is possible to provide an education on only what you will use. This presupposes of course that you know exactly what you will use, but more importantly, it will conne you to the use of only that knowledge. On the other extreme, a liberal education gives you a broad preparation with a profound knowledge of nothing but the ability to learn later on anything that you need. The 6

path that you are going through is in the middle; you learn uid mechanics but you do not learn to design multi-stage radial gas compressors, for instance. The hope is that, if you need to, you can learn to do so. You have the basic knowledge, the technical language skills to be able to read and understand the literature, and the analytical skills to be able to apply it. In the end you will nd that gas compressors work under the same physical principles you have been using in other problems in class, nothing new there. But what if you never work with anything related to uid mechanics, is the time spent on it then wasted? The answer again is no. If all you learn from a uid mechanics class is uid mechanics, then perhaps the time is indeed wasted. But if you learn how to analyze a problem in general, represent it in mathematical form, solve the mathematics, and then interpret the results physically, it will help you in many dierent ways. This is similar to saying that you are better o learning to add any set of numbers, even though in life you will have to actually add only specic sets. You do not a priori know what numbers they will be, and in any case it is far easier to learn the general technique of addition than only specic examples. The use of examples to help in learning the general principle should not be confused with knowing only those examples. Once you have the analytical skills developed by uid mechanics and similar courses, you will be able to apply the skills to whatever comes up. Next, why a uid mechanics laboratory? The answer to this is more dicult. Given that uid mechanics is important, isnt it enough to have it in a theory class? You learn how a uid behaves, how it ows, and how to calculate things about it. This is related to an even deeper question: do you really need to have multiple objects around you to be able to learn to add? It is impossible to tell since we always have objects around us. Would an alien race, for example, that didnt have any discover arithmetic? In principle it is possible, and in principle it is possible for you to learn all that you need to know from a book. The human mind, of course, is capable of very abstract thought and can distinguish between the statement that 2 + 3 = 5 and that two apples and three apples together make ve apples. In a similar fashion, losses in pipelines, to cite one simple example, can be learned through equations, but would they have the same physical feel? That is, would you know, really know what it means, long after the formulas are forgotten? I would argue, and I believe that most of you 7

would agree, that a hands-on laboratory experience reinforces, at the very least, book learning. But then, what about a laboratory for every course? Shouldnt dynamics have one, and thermodynamics, and all the others? An experiment with hockey pucks sliding across an air table can help explain the conservation of momentum during collision; a p V T -cell can make thermodynamics more vivid. How would we t these into the curriculum? Obviously we couldnt, even though faculty often wonder if laboratories in their favorite subjects should be included. There has to be a balance; traditionally a uid mechanics laboratory is included in a mechanical engineering curriculum. In our case, we have designed this to be the third in a 3course series: Measurements Laboratory, Solids Mechanics Laboratory, and this. The courses have been designed to be a continuum, and to teach a related set of concepts. So, the current course is not meant merely to conrm what you have seen in the uid mechanics class, in fact it would miss the point entirely if this were the case. Moreover, one can argue that if the student were to take only one course in uid mechanics, a laboratory course rather than theory should be the one. If children were left with enough apples and oranges, they would ultimately gure out the rules of arithmetic; the knowledge would be very rm, but too slow in coming. We are in a rush, we would like the student to know so many things in a four-year period, and so we put all that in the theory classes. But the point still remains that the theory has been developed to solve certain real-life problems involving uids, and unless you see what they are, the knowledge is abstract. It may be, and I see a certain practical advantage to this, that the laboratory should come before the theory. After all the purpose of the theory is to explain the problems that you will need to solve, instead of those that can be solved. I have tried to give a perspective on the role that uid mechanics plays in an engineering curriculum as I see it, but there is much more to be said. In future lectures I will give you my perspective on what I hope you will be learning this semester.

The laboratory
Spring, 1999. By now you have had some experience with a couple of complete cycles of the laboratory, you are familiar with the experiments themselves and with data analysis and report writing. This is a good time to discuss the objectives behind the course, and what you are expected to learn from it. Fluid mechanics is, of course, the central topic. So what is it about uid mechanics that you learn from a laboratory that is dierent from a book? Before I get into that, let me rst discuss what I hope you will learn this semester that is not related to uid mechanics, at least it is not exclusive to uid mechanics. Put a dierent way, if uid mechanics were all you learned from this laboratory, the time is not well spent. This laboratory, as I have mentioned before, is the third in a series of three laboratory-based courses in mechanical engineering, following those on Measurements and Solid Mechanics. The sequence is designed in the following manner. The experimental experience in the rst is in a controlled environment; you are more or less told what to do and what results to obtain, and how to manipulate and interpret the data. It is, after all, the rst engineering laboratory experience for you. The second revolves around solid mechanics, but the organization of the laboratory is such as to put a greater burden on you. You work under the supervision of a graduate student, but you have to depend on your own resources to read the written material to gure out how to process the data appropriately. The third course, this one, takes the process one step farther; you have some guidance in terms of written material, but it is up to you to decide what exactly to do, how to do it and what to make of the results. Moreover, there is a minimum that you can do, or you can be creative and do more than that. This is not the end of the series; in the senior year you will have Senior 9

Design in which you are set free and have only your own wits, imagination and the knowledge you have gained in the program, to design and construct a machine that will fulll a given goal. Soon thereafter, of course, you may have to prove your ability for independent and creative thought and action in the context of a working life. To instill independence and creativity is really the purpose behind education. If all you have when you leave is a collection of facts and gures, it will be dicult, in the long run, to put that information to use in any practical fashion. Besides, it will soon be obsolete. If, however, you learn how to nd information and how to use it, that process will never go out of style. In this course you are given a minimum of information, but you have at hand a basic knowledge of uid mechanics as well as the textbook itself. This is much like how it is going to be in the real world. You have to gure out what to do in the laboratory. You will determine what measurements to record, and how to process the data. This is the procedure behind every experiment, large or small, simple or complicated. You may nd, in the beginning, that when you sit down to do the calculations you do not have all the data that you need. In this case you will have to go back again and get what you need. This is also how it is often done in real life, though it is not a recommended procedure. By the time the semester is over you will have learned to think and plan ahead, and make sure that you have noted all the information you will need before you leave the laboratory. Knowledge gained from a laboratory course is, in a certain sense, real. The calculations themselves are no dierent from what you do in a theory class. The dierence, however, lies in that you have a physical system in front of you. Your measurements correspond to some quantity in this system. For most people, this helps make the abstract concrete. You think of the pressure not simply as a symbol p, but as a physical quantity that can be represented by a symbol, p, x or any other. There is a dierence between reality and our representation of it, and engineering is a discipline that is based on reality. Mathematics is often used as a model or surrogate for reality. It is certainly easier to manipulate equations to determine numbers than it is to make an experiment every time we wanted to know how a certain design would turn out, but we must not confuse the model with reality. Another important aspect to learning in the laboratory environment relates to skills that you acquire on the use of tools. These skills, along with others such as 10

writing ability and computer literacy, will also be valuable in an engineering career. Generally speaking, current engineering programs do not really give you any exposure to the use of machinery for manufacture, which would have been good, but to a limited extent to the use of measuring instruments. You have used them before in the previous laboratory courses, and any further experience that you get with them is benecial. Each instrument is dierent and its operation has to be learned separately. When you come across any new device, it will take you some time to become familiar with it to the point that you know exactly what it is doing. However, having used similar instruments will give you the condence to handle most anything new. Most of the instruments that you see in the laboratory are o the shelf items of general use, and you will become familiar with the practical aspects of characteristics such as sensitivity, oset and range. Along with the instruments themselves, you also learn to use modern techniques of data acquisition and processing. Computer use in the laboratory has become very common over the last ten years, and an ability to work with them is a necessary skill in most experimental work. Because of time constraints your exposure to these tools is necessarily partial; the computer programs are set up for you to use, although in a working environment you may be responsible not only for choosing the hardware appropriate for the job, but also writing the software to do it. You will also use computerized tools for data analysis, processing images, drawing graphs, and writing reports. The point to be remembered in all these items is not the specic tool that you learn to use but the fact that you have to learn by yourself, by asking other people or from the manuals. Again, it is not what you learn but how you learn it that will be the most useful skill in the long run. If you can do it once, you can do it again when required to do so in the future. Along with knowledge, skills should not be frozen but must move with the times. Reading the recommended reading material and making sense from it is another part of the learning process. There may be many instances in what you see and do in the laboratory that you need to read up upon. That is ne; if you dont know something, at least you know how to nd the information. But nding the information is also not enough, you must be able to understand it and to use it. This is where your previous education comes in. Someone without the appropriate education in the eld can read the same material but not understand it at all. There is not only 11

technical jargon to be overcome but also a body of knowledge is needed that is simple for you but not for the other person. This is what you will have to do in the future in situations for which you are not completely prepared. Writing is another important ability that you are practicing. Engineers are often taken to task for their poor skills in this regard, even though writing and presentation skills are very important in many of the careers that engineers pursue. There are several reasons why writing is the often the preferred mode of communication: before you can write something down you have to really understand what you are going to say; what you write will stay around for some time and can be passed on and read by many who are not initial recipients of the information. There have often been discussions within the faculty as to where the writing skill is learned, and it invariably comes down to the practice of report writing. Of course, reports are not exclusive to the laboratories but, unlike in a theory class, they are the main vehicle of student expression in a laboratory course. What must you learn about writing and from writing? That it is important to express yourself clearly and concisely in a language that free from grammatical, spelling and other errors. It is often said that mathematics and graphics are the twin languages of the engineer. Use them well, but use them appropriately within a context of a text. Writing is an art, and like all arts cannot be taught. You have to see examples of it to see what is good and what should be avoided, and you have to practice it again and again. And yes, you will also learn about uid mechanics. In the laboratory you will come across phenomena that you will observe or measure that merited only a passing reference in the theory class, if that. The reason is that not all uid mechanical phenomena can be calculated and dissected from a theoretical perspective, but that does not make them any less important. It is also important to get a feeling for the quantities that you measure. How fast must a water ow really be before it turns turbulent? What kind of pressure drop can you expect in an elbow or other tting as compared to a straight pipe? Another important aspect is to know the limitations of theory. Practical engineering applications of uid mechanics is heavily dependent on the use of empirically obtained coecients and factors. It is often not obvious to a beginner in the subject what these are, and how much one should trust the values that one obtains from handbooks. In many cases you will nd values and numbers that 12

are dierent from those commonly accepted in the literature. When that happens, does it mean that you are wrong and that the books are right? Not necessarily. Your measurements may be exact but the setup of the experiment maybe dierent from that in the literature. As a practicing engineer you may have to adapt an idealized solution or piece of information to a situation that is similar but not identical. Of course all measurements have errors, but how large are they and are they important? A laboratory exercise gives you some feeling for the order of magnitude of the errors you may have in any calculation derived from the measurement. You may nd that for a given phenomenon, a 25% error is good, 5% excellent, and 1% impossible to get, while for another 5, 1 and 0.2 may be the corresponding numbers. It all depends on the phenomenon that you are measuring. To be able to use the results of a theoretical calculation in a design, for example, is very important to know the accuracy of the numbers that you calculate. In fact you may be called upon to make predictions in situations in which there is no exact procedure to do so and a guesstimate is all that can be done. Engineers have to build and not everything they build is completely understood in all its details. Theoretical calculations, on the other hand, sometimes give the impression that something can be calculated to a large number of signicant gures. This is not true if the calculation is based on some experimental quantity. In this connection, a common rule of thumb is to use numbers up to three signicant gures only (except if it starts with 1 in which case four signicant gures is all right); after all it indicates an accuracy of better than 1%, which is pretty good. In fact, after doing the experiments you will appreciate how good an error of only 1% really is. So you see there is much more to the laboratory than getting numbers and calculating results. Most of the times you will not be aware that you are learning something. But if you spend time in the laboratory and think about the apparatus and what you are doing while you are doing it, you will gain the experience and skills that will serve you well in the future.

13

Design of the experiments

This chapter has been written with the help of Rod McClain. Spring, 1999. Working with the experiments, you may wonder why they are designed exactly the way they are. Another reason to know is that in the future, it may happen that some of you may be required by your job to not only work with experiments, but also design them. In this lecture I will try to give you some background on how the experiments you see came to be that way. Like all design, this is a creative process with no unique answer, and every semester we actually come up with slightly dierent results. There are several people involved the process: Mr. Rod McClain, Professional Specialist, is in overall charge of the lab, Mr. Chuck Klein, Machinist, does whatever milling, cutting, and drilling is needed in the machine shop, and Mr. Kevin Peters, Technician, helps to put the experiments together and set up the computers. The rst step in the process is to select the experiments. Some of the most important criteria for this are the following. Safety: The experiments must be, above all else, as safe as we can make them. Water and electricity do not mix well, and a uids lab must have both. The experiments are designed so that these two are well separated. Moving machinery is mostly kept out of the way. Simplicity of operation: By looking at the experimental apparatus, an observer should be able to gure out how to start it, which way the uids ow, and what is happening in the experiment. In conjunction with safety, this means that the pumps should be separated from the measurement area but easily visible. A 14

very complex piece of machinery or piping would be hard to understand in a short time. Simplicity in manufacture and assembly: We usually have only a couple of weeks to put together the experiments. Even though instructional use of the Departments machine shop is given rst priority, often there is need of an additional tool that takes time to get, or there is a breakdown of equipment that slows down the process. Apparatus that is complicated to construct is sometimes planned and built over several years. For example, the water tables, which are simple to use, are fabricated in a relatively complicated manner which includes the cutting, heating, bending, and joining of transparent material. Simple to maintain: Most operational problems should be simple to x during use. The students are extremely careful with what they do in the laboratory, fully justifying the trust that has been put on them. However, normal wear and tear has to take place. This is especially important for equipment that has been in use for a long time. Sometimes maintenance is not possible and we have to adapt to a loss in the middle of experiments. Last year a turbine ow meter that had been in use for ten years simply decided that it had enough, and we had to retire that experiment. Expense: We have a xed budget to work with. Some major items are purchased slowly over the years to replace those that are worn out or obsolete. We have recently bought new Windows-based computers to replace some old Macs, but we need more in the future. Robustness: The experiments must be able to take the wear and tear from ninety students a week without frequent breakdowns. We have also found that working with uids other than air or water tends to be very messy. Variety: Some experiments should explain basic principles and a fundamental understanding of uid mechanics, and others should parallel the use of uid mechanics in industry. Similarly, some measurements should be manual and others computerized. This way you can see the advantages and disadvantages of both. 15

 New experiments: We usually put in some new experiments every semester and upgrade others. If we ourselves dont take an interest in the experiments, we cannot expect the students to do so either. The following is the procedure that we use to put together the experiments. Selection: Rod McClain and I get together, perhaps several times a week, beginning a couple of months before the experiments are due to be operational. We have a long list of possible experiments and ideas from which to choose. We discuss what the experiments will be, what relation they have to the real life use of instrumentation and uid mechanics, what basic principles they illustrate, whether they preserve an adequate balance between what can truly be calculated from theory and what cannot, as well as a balance between experiments using air and those using water. The experiments, furthermore, should be simple enough to be easily understood at a glance so that it isnt a black box. Design: We rst sketch some options on the blackboard, and then decide on the ones we will do this semester. Rod McClain then designs the apparatus in terms of dimensions, pump sizes, measuring instruments, and mechanical assembly. Often the initial idea undergoes a substantial change for the better. This process is a combination of machine design and uid mechanics. The design should be such as to be easily manufactured and assembled. The uid mechanics calculations are essentially a reverse of what you do after you have taken the data. In order to estimate the various quantities, he looks up values of friction factors and ow coecients reported in the literature so that he can determine reasonable ow rates and pressure drops. Then he can choose from standard piping sizes, pump catalogs, and electronic instruments so that the outputs that you actually measure, the voltage going to a multimeter for instance, are large enough for you to get good data. Often the requirements are conictive, we have to make choices, and a perfect design is not entirely possible. We also try to use o the shelf equipment and instruments, both for cost considerations and also because that is what you will probably encounter in the future. 16

 Manufacture and assembly: Chuck Klein and Kevin Peters help out in this stage. Often this part of the process is iterative if there is some error in machining or in the design. Remember that it is very dierent having an experiment working in the blackboard, and actually doing what it is supposed to do on the lab oor. Pipes usually dont leak on the blackboard, for one thing. In this regard, experience is the best teacher, and I am happy to say that the sta is very experienced in what they do. Sometimes, when we try new things, the result is not entirely as expected. Testing: We run through the experiment ourselves before putting it on line. Sometimes there are minor modications to be made even at this late stage. Instructions: The write-up for an experiment cannot be nalized until the experiment itself is. There are two types of instructions to be given. Some are general in terms of a schematic of the experiment, the objectives, recommended readings, and the equations to be used; these are posted on the Web. Others make sense only with the experiment in front of you, like information on calibration or how to use the software; so these are posted at the workstation. Some of the components, especially those hidden from view, also need to labeled. In the end, you will notice that not every detail is provided, so that you develop an ability to deduce what you dont know from the information at hand. As an example, you have to gure out that the valve handle parallel to the pipe signies an open valve, which you can do by opening one valve and checking the resulting ow rate in the rotameter. There are also certain specic comments that we can make regarding each one of the experiments that you are doing this half-semester. Unit 1: Hydrostatics Hydrostatics is one of the few instances in uid mechanics for which we have exact mathematical solutions (some laminar ows being another). The experiments will show that, in spite of this, the experimental results are not perfect and one should have a healthy respect for the diculty of getting perfect results. (a) Piston in cylinder 17

This is an experiment that we have used for a number of years. It is simple but instructive. The interior spring and the process of bringing the piston back to the same level together enable the linearity of the force-pressure relationship to be demonstrated without knowledge of the spring characteristics. The piston-cylinder arrangements are o the shelf pneumatic actuators commonly used in control applications. (b) Free surface under rotation Though other measuring techniques, like optical devices, could have been used, we have opted for simplicity and not necessarily accuracy. Having to shift the origin of the distance measurements to conform to theoretical results, is also a useful exercise. In real life you will often nd that the information is not in the form you would like to have; this is a simple example. Unit 2: Flow visualization This provides an excellent opportunity for the visual appreciation of the complexity of ow phenomena. (a) Water table The experiment itself is simple, but the handling of photographic images is very modern. In fact what you learn in this regard will hopefully be useful to you in other applications in the future. In the design of water ow visualization by dye, it is important for the water speed to be low enough for the dye not to mix quickly with the surrounding water, nor sink due to density dierences. (b) Reynoldss experiment This is a classic experiment. The settling chamber as we have it is not large enough to do the job well. Furthermore, a vertical tube would have avoided the eect of descending dye streams due to density dierences. We intend to redo this experiment in the future. Pressure measurement by a manometer illustrates a simple and accurate method that is to be contrasted to the electronic output of a pressure transducer used elsewhere. Unit 3: Flow measurement 18

These are a set of basic measuring instruments that are commonly used. One of the problems is that that the three measuring devices have vastly dierent pressure drops. Since we have used a single pressure transducer, there is no way out of having one of the devices, the total-head tube in this case, with a relatively small reading in the multimeter. In each device the pressure drop produced had to be matched with the range of the transducer and the capability of the pump. (a) Mean velocity The Venturi was made in the shop (for a cost of $10 as opposed to about $800 for a purchased item). The main design criterion is that the expansion angle be small to avoid ow separation; otherwise it would be working as an orice. Both Venturi and orice meters are instruments in common use in industry. (b) Total-head tube Unfortunately this is one of the instruments that you cannot see, so a drawing has to be provided. The total-head tube is more common in air-handling applications; in fact it is also used in Unit 4(b). Unit 4: Pipe ow These are a couple of experiments with air. It is very dicult to have a laminar ow of air, and the ows here are turbulent. (a) Entrance eects and losses We introduce computerized data acquisition that is typical of many modern measuring systems. The software is written so as to display the pressure vs. distance curve which gives visual meaning to the dierence in the behavior between the entrance and the fully developed regions. (b) LFE and velocity prole You get to see what a turbulent velocity prole looks like, and how dierent it is compared to a parabolic laminar one. Unit 5: Minor losses 19

These are basic components of many hydraulic systems, widely used but only empirically understood. These experiments illustrate how the coecients reported in the literature are obtained. (a) Valves You are introduced to a variety of dierent valves, each with a dierent loss coecient to opening angle relation. An appreciation of the nonlinearity of this relation is important, especially for control applications. Valves, particularly globe and needle valves, are carefully designed to produce a near-linear behavior around the point of operation. (b) Fittings You are introduced to a variety of dierent ttings.

20

A theoretician looks at the Fluids Laboratory

The guest writer for this lecture is Professor Joseph M. Powers. Spring, 1999. When Prof. Sen asked me to make a contribution to this new venture of electronic lectures, in the old sense of the word lecture, I was somewhat unsure of what to contribute. Having skimmed through the rst few of these lecture has not led to any grand insights, but has encouraged me to adopt a somewhat informal, stream-ofconsciousness style in giving my comments on uids lab. First a bit about myself, as it relates to this topic. I was educated entirely as a mechanical engineer, obtaining three degrees in this eld, with my graduate work focusing on developing and solving theoretical models for the uid mechanics of chemically reactive systems. I never had a uids lab in my undergraduate or graduate curricula, though there were plenty of courses on uids theory. We werent short on lab courses however: there were full courses in solids lab, measurements lab, controls lab, chemistry lab, physics lab, etc. Fluids just did not happen to make the cut in the required courses. Thats all immaterial, as Prof. Sen has pointed out in his earlier lectures, in many ways one important goal of a laboratory course, whatever the subject matter, is to instill in the student the idea that the theory has some grounding in empirical physical reality. That is there are many paths to knowledge and understanding. Observation is one of them and in many ways is the foundation of Western science, at least after the Renaissance. You may recall the dangers of theory not grounded at some level in empiricism: Aristotle wrote books on physics. He decided that F = mv . He should have checked. Any rocket he designed would probably 21

crash ; even knowing F = ma, about 10% of our rockets dont make it. Anyway, despite the bulk of my own research being theoretical, I have always been surrounded by uid laboratories. At the University of Illinois, my oce was next door to half a dozen screaming supersonic wind tunnels, and my oce, save me, was lled with four screaming graduate students working on their experiments. I have also worked at a number of laboratories and in most instances sought and found signicant interaction with my colleagues whose rst priority was in the laboratory. In a recent experience, I shared an oce with a physicist who was designing multimillion dollar experiments involving high speed impact dynamics. He had been doing this for nearly ten years after an education similar to my own, which focused entirely on theory. What I saw in him was someone who truly understood the motivation for why he was doing the experiment and was really able to do excellent detective work in analyzing why it behaved as it did. I think he achieved success because he worked at having competence in all areas. First, his work had certain goals, generally requiring detailed experimental evidence. An example question would be, if we hit this material really hard (some number would be attached to quantify it), will this component survive or break? The answer is simply not known beforehand, and it is going to be very expensive to nd out, so he needs to do it right the rst time, no partial credit. Second, he knew how to design and engineer his equipment to provide denitive answers to those questions. Heres where a lot of creativity was required. Could one design a simple experiment for a prototype that would mimic the behavior of the model? Third he knew how to use theoretical analysis to guide him in designing his experiment. Before any experiment was run, a large nite element code was exercised to get an idea of what would happen. As with nearly all theoretical models, their predictions do give some idea of how the system behaves, but they cannot capture every detail; some of these details can be critically important. Nevertheless, the theoretical model predictions were able to give very good estimates, and reassurance that the experiment had a chance to answer the proper question. Often times, the experiment was re-designed before the actual test in response to disturbing model predictions. After the experimental tests were run, there was a quite long post-mortem phase which required a lot of analysis of the results. An important question was always, did it behave in the way we thought it would, and 22

if not, why not? What impressed me most was that one skilled person was able to marshal both experimental and theoretical skill in such a fashion to get at the heart of some important science/engineering questions. The goal was to get at the truth, and to use the best set of tools to get the answer. Brains, theory, empiricism: all worked together. Do they always work together? No. Sometimes I see this as a problem and sometimes not. Working at another laboratory a few years ago, I found myself surrounded on one worksite by some experimentalists who had little use for theoreticians, and at a nearby site by theoreticians who had little use for experimentalists. The method of the experimentalist was to hit a specimen hard and see what happened. Then try it again, then again. Theyre still hitting things, breaking them, and Im not quite sure what theyve learned. Their theoretical colleagues in a nearby building stayed busy mainly talking with themselves, making tweaks to a code which had fundamental aws and have little hope for providing rst principles answers for any questions. It may have some value as an fancy way to do interpolation, but it was not clear that it was either science or engineering. At yet another laboratory, I worked with a group that was purely theoretical, and many of them were making good contributions despite not having a experiment in sight. What were they up to? In a nutshell, algorithm improvement. There are some very classical problems that are so well understood theoretically and experimentally that no one really questions them. Nevertheless, many of these problems may require a lot of computational resources to accurately simulate with a theoretical model. An example might be the ow of a low Reynolds number uid over a sphere. Currently there is a lot of room for improvements in algorithms for solving well-known equations of uid mechanics. At lunch recently, Prof. Bass of the CSE department relayed a story of a researcher here at Notre Dame who was solving equations which modelled groundwater ow. A simulation generally took over twenty-four hours. This faculty member asked a colleague in the CSE department to look at the source code; by making a few changes in how do loops were structured, what used to run in twentyfour hours then ran in twenty-four minutes! Often times however, it is much more challenging to increase the eciency. In fact some of these problems have challenged some of the best minds of this century. We do not have the best algorithm yet, and 23

we are probably not even close to what could be, so there is still lots of work to be done. So what does all of this have to do with uids lab? Im not really sure. I do know that one goal that I would encourage you to adopt in your education, which will continue after university is to do your best to understand why things behave as they do. Being able to answer such questions will make you a valuable person to your company and more importantly to your society. Having taught the uids laboratory before, I know there are many opportunities to ex your neurons on such matters. Now most of you will not be spending your lives calculating Strouhal numbers or measuring friction factors. There may come a time when they might in fact be useful, but even more useful I think is that uids lab oers an opportunity to understand some basic realities of nature which are well grounded in theory, and in that oers hope that there are other things in nature that we may come to understand. My hypothesis is that it was the instilled bravado, combined with a knowledge of both theory and empiricism that was instilled in generations of past engineers, that led us to Kitty Hawk in 1903 and the Sea of Tranquility in 1969 and many places to come in future years. It is only with an appreciation of both that we will reach them. Question from a student I just read your lecture, in conjunction with continuing work I am doing on a uids lab. In the E-Lecture you said, most of us probably will not be calculating Strouhal numbers and friction factors. While those exact words have not been uttered by other professors, others have said that we will probably not be doing this specic task or that specic task. It seems then that we do a lot of things that we will never do. I write, not to say why dont we do what we will actually do as professionals, the reasons we do those things is reasonably clear. What, then, does a professional engineer do in a career? Clearly there are too many things we can do to enumerate, but generally speaking, what is so dierent about the work of a professional engineer and a student engineer? Articiality, trivia, and simplicity seems to be the core of a student engineers life, does this go away at the professional level? graduate level? In class I have heard three professors recently comment that we will not be doing this or that ... it just made me wonder. If you have any insight on the subject and/or know what it is that a real engineer does, please, do tell. 24

Professor Powerss answer Thanks for reading the lecture. To your question, what do real engineers do, a comprehensive answer is very dicult. They really do an incredible range of tasks from designing new technology, maintaining existing technology, selling products, managing personnel and projects, running companies, etc. These tasks usually require a wide variety of skills, including fundamental knowledge of math, chemistry, and physics; fundamental knowledge of an engineering discipline, written and oral communication ability, and broad knowledge of humanistic knowledge. It really is impossible for any four year educational institution to give each student detailed preparation for EVERY possible contingency that you may be faced with in an engineering career. It cannot be done, and it would be foolish to try. What we can do is focus on some standards which are accepted throughout the engineering community and educate you for prociency in those. To some what may seem articial and trivial, to others may be a fundamental core principle. I play the piano, and there is an analogy between piano pedagogy and engineering pedagogy. I have spent literally hours working on scales and arpeggios. They are not fun, they are not particularly interesting musically, and certainly most people dont want to hear them, especially when repeated and repeated. And yet to play Mozart well, one really must get the discipline which is most easily acquired by doing the preliminary exercises. I also played basketball in high school. Our practices focused on calisthenics, drills, and wind sprints; scrimmage was a small part. Without these however, our game would have suered. The same analogy holds for gure skaters: the beauty of Katerina Witts long program would not have been obtained without the focus in practice on the fundamentals. I think you get the point. You mention that some professors, including myself, say you probably wont be doing [this] in your job, That is often a fact, to deny it would be dishonest. That does not mean there is no value in learning such a task. Another fact is that you will be doing SOMETHING, who knows what, and that something will probably require you to know some aspect of engineering VERY well. A visiting faculty told me he was hired as a consultant by some former students of his. He was not terribly impressed with their performance in his uids class ten years previously, but found working for GE Gas Turbine Engines had considerably honed their uids skills so that they were 25

completely up to speed with him on most of the issues. These students DID need the Strouhal number. Another group that should have learned the Strouhal number were the engineers who designed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which collapsed because of a Strouhal number eect. But it remains a fact that most engineers dont use the Strouhal number. I remember well two contrasting conversations Ive had with graduates of our program. The rst was with Jim Weatherbee, ND 74, BSAE, who has piloted several space shuttle missions. I asked him how much of his undergraduate education he has had occasion to use. His reply was instant, Ive used all of it. Now, Weatherbee was an unusually gifted student put into extraordinary circumstances, but that still made me feel pretty good. I saw another former student, David, in the hallway as he returned to campus for a football game. David had been in my uids class, and graduated with a roughly 2.4 GPA. I asked what he was doing now. Consulting with a nancial rm, was his reply. I asked him how often he got to use the friction factor and the rest of his engineering fundamentals. His reply was also instant: Never. I then asked, with so many engineers going to non-traditional jobs, would he recommend altering our education system to reect that. Once again, instantly, he said, Dont change a thing! He said that the problem solving skills, the work ethic, and the fundamental thinking that an engineering education instills were extremely valuable to him on his job. His supervisors recognized that, which is why they hired engineers over seemingly better qualied business majors. I will conclude by reiterating the point I was trying to make in the e-lecture. Understanding Strouhal numbers and friction factors can be useful, but even more, understanding them gives evidence that there is a part of nature that we can understand and hope that there is more that can be understood. This spirit has led engineers to y to the moon, win the cold war, and build the internet. Theres more to build.

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Limitations in our knowledge and methods

Spring, 1999. Knowledge in all the sciences is of two kinds: theoretical and empirical. The former comes from paper and pencil calculations while the latter is more based on experimental observations. Fluid mechanics is especially well-placed to exemplify this separation, as well as their unication and blending for the purposes of practical use. Theoretical knowledge and methodology can also be of two kinds: analytical in which closed-form solutions are obtained, and numerical where a computer code must be used. All knowledge is, at a fundamental level, empirical. We observe the world around us and see things always happening a certain way. From this we formulate our basic laws, examples of which are the laws of motion and those of thermodynamics. There is no way to prove these laws; it is just the way nature is. Once we accept that, we can use these laws to build up predictions for more complex situations. We use the tools provided by mathematics, for instance, to calculate quantities that may be of interest. One example of this procedure is CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) that uses computational techniques (nite dierences, nite elements, spectral methods, panel methods, etc.) for ow calculations that can be used to help design a uid machine. If every uid problem could be accurately and cheaply solved in this way, there would be no need for experiments. Unfortunately, this is not so. There is one elementary reason why experimental information is needed: theoretical models are useless without material properties like uid viscosity, density, etc. However that is not all; even if all information on properties were well known, not all 27

problems are solvable by theoretical means. There are various reasons for this. Analytical solutions of the dierential governing equations are available only for very few cases, and approximations can be obtained for some more. Even though wherever closed form expressions for the calculated quantities exist they are preferable to numerical computations, the range and variety of these solutions are limited. Computation may not be possible in a given problem. This is particularly true for many turbulent ows for which the best that can be done is to replace the governing equations with its time-averaged analog with plausible models to take into account turbulence. In any case and in the best of circumstances these models have free constants which have to be carefully calibrated against experiments. The cost of a computation may be too high. This happens if there is a wide distribution of length or time scales in the problem. For example, if the ratio of the largest to smallest length scale is of order 10 in a three-dimensional ow, a computational mesh of at least 10 10 10, i.e. 103 , will be needed. Many of the practical problems in the eld involve scale ratios much larger than that which cannot be solved at a reasonable cost. Such is the case for many laminar ows and most turbulent ones. The cost of computation is based on the hardware necessary to run the computational code and the time it takes for it to obtain results. The hardware can range from a PC or a UNIX-based workstation all the way up to a supercomputer where an hour of computer time could cost a thousand dollars. Computational results may not be obtained in real time. For control purposes, for instance, it is important to have results in real time so that a stabilizing signal can be applied. The items above suggest that it is not always possible or practical to take our basic engineering laws and deduce from them analytically or numerically the desired results. If this is so, why then do we teach or learn the theory? There are several reasons for this. 28

 Numerical computations must be rst validated against known analytical solutions. If we write a computer code to do a certain job, the rst solution that it must be asked to obtain is one for which we have a known answer. If it can get that, then there is a chance that it may be right in another problem for which we do not have the solution. A similar situation exists with respect to experiments. If possible, the rst time the apparatus is run, the experimental results must be checked against known results. These may be in the form of solutions obtained another way or by previous experimenters. Instruments are often calibrated in this fashion. For both numerical and experimental techniques, analytical solutions provide an absolute benchmark against which they can be validated or calibrated and the order of any error precisely determined. Analytical solutions provide a physical understanding of the ow from which much can be obtained. For example, it is known that for laminar ow the drag of an object is proportional to the ow velocity. Neither numerical nor experimental techniques will give such precise information. This physical understanding is often all that is necessary for a successful analysis or design. What then are the advantages of numerical techniques? Let us summarize. Numerical methods are of greater reach than analytical methods. For example, analytical solutions exist for the drag of ow around a sphere for low Reynolds numbers. This is the Stokes drag relation which is valid only for a Reynolds number of order unity or below. Numerical methods can provide solutions for higher Reynolds numbers even in the presence of separation behind the sphere as long as the ow is laminar. Numerical methods can be used where no exact or approximate solution is available. Once the computational code has been written and veried, it can be used over and over again with little change. This has led to a number of commercial codes in the market to solve general problems in uid mechanics. 29

Now we come to the advantages of experiments. Experiments are reality. This cannot be overemphasized. The approximations made in all theoretical approaches are not present here. Of course, there may be other approximations if we are forced to carry out the experiment in a setup dierent from the one in which we actually want the answer. The size or some other factor may be dierent. Turbulence is dealt with in a much easier fashion. Using modern tools like the hot-wire anemometer, laser doppler anemometer, or particle image velocimeter, detailed spatial and time distributions of the velocity can be obtained. Parametric variations are sometimes much easier. If, for example, one is interested in the drag coecient on a sphere as a function of Reynolds number, one merely has to run the experiment for measuring the drag force the desired number of times. Each experiment does not take long. In a numerical method also the runs have to be repeated many times, but the computational time increases as the Reynolds number goes up. One can thus look upon the triad of techniques, analytical, numerical and experimental, as complementing rather than substituting for each other. Often, if the prediction is critical, two or three of the approaches will be used, the most common being the numerical with the experimental. If they conrm each other, one can be reasonably sure that the results are right. From that point on one can use whichever method is cheaper to provide an accurate answer. The last issue that I would like to discuss today is the limitations on our theoretical knowledge. If we are to blend theoretical and experimental approaches in real life, we must be aware where knowledge of one kind ends and the other begins. The undergraduate-level books often do not make this very clear, I have sometimes discussed experimental results with students who have assumed that whatever is given in the textbook is accurate and that his or her experiment must be wrong. To take an example, let us look at the critical Reynolds number of 2300 for transition from laminar to turbulent ow in a pipe (p. 37 in the book). What the book does not say is that there is no theoretical basis for this number. All that it represents is an 30

average value for a large number of experiments. In fact there is a wide divergence in the results of these experiments due to entrance conditions and other disturbances that may be present in the pipe. Some semesters students have obtained values of 1700 and in others 2800. There is nothing wrong in either value; what would be wrong is to discard ones answer which is dependent on what is actually happening in favor of what the book says. To be fair, it is extremely dicult for you to question a number provided by a source of certain authority, especially when it uses words like pipe ow is laminar when Re 2300 . . ., but it is important to bear in mind that the authority may possibly be wrong. Well not exactly wrong, but there are complicated arguments that are, for reasons of simplicity, left out of the discussion in the book. One of the main purposes of the uid mechanics laboratory is for you to learn the limitations of theory and the kind of information that can only be obtained experimentally. There is another kind of trap that one can get into in not looking at the ne print in a book. Again, taking the example of Reynolds number, the critical value of 2300 is only for pipe ow. In fact this is clearly mentioned in the text. However, I have encountered many instances where the values have been assumed as holding for all ows internal or external. I wish that uid mechanics were so simple, but it is not. The transition of a boundary layer from laminar to turbulent may occur for a Reynolds number (based on distance from the leading edge) of around 5 105 (p. 413). In this case it turns out that the theory of the onset of turbulence is quite advanced and there is considerable theoretical overlap between theoretical and experimental results. The conclusion of this discussion is that neither theoretical nor experimental knowledge is superior to the other but is merely complementary. One must be careful to nd out which is which, and also be aware of the exact boundaries of our knowledge as well as those of the methods that we use to work with them. Only then can we apply them appropriately to practical problems. Though here I have used uid mechanics as an example, the basic ideas are true for many of the disciplines that you will see within engineering.

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Goodbye
Spring 2002 In the Spring of 1999 when these lectures were written, I had made some notes to myself of topics to add in future versions. However, I have not taught the course since then. Since this is something that I have not done, I leave them for you as ideas to think about. Unconstrained by reality, what would a dream lab be, what hardware would it have, and what would the students learn? Rather than being a science, experimentation is an art with no unique answers. These is a tendency to think of a lab as being just like a theory course, with the only dierence being that you have to generate the numbers experimentally to do the homework. It is, however, more than that. In these electronic lectures I have tried to tell you the reasons behind why we teach things the way we do, and also what the objectives of this course are. Some of the goals are tangible and clear while the others are not so. My hope is that you have learned the tangibles and are well on your way towards the intangibles. Learning to think, do and write clearly about something will be a lifelong need, and uid mechanics is merely an example. What you have learned in this course during this semester is only a beginning. In the future I hope that you will have the time to look back and the desire to build on it.

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