Entering college, I was pretty unexperienced in the academic realm of physics and engineering. It was hard to know what I liked and what was out there without being familiar with a lot of the jargon and concepts of Physics. Most of my experience coming into college was from working on cars, but I had never taken a calculus-based physics or engineering course. However, I did know that I wanted to work on moving things, and that physics classes were where I needed to be in order to gain the knowledge to do so. The second semester of my freshman year, I got invited to join the Geography Department on a project to update and design a new flume for them, as their previous design was problematic and leaky. On the physics side, this project fell into the realm of “Fluid Dynamics,” which is the study of fluids, and the way they move through and around objects.
Fluid Dynamics as a sector of physics has more applications than someone might imagine, since air is treated as a fluid in physics. So, the sector of Fluid Dynamics covers everything from water interacting with a submarine to a rocket moving through the atmosphere. Additionally, the project involved designing and building a flume, not just studying them, so it had a lot of potential as an engineering project. When I was reached out to about joining the project, I had no idea how to build a flume, and had minimal knowledge of what a flume was or how it was used. So, naturally, I went straight to YouTube to see what I could find, which would give me my first major lesson of the project.
I found a channel called Fluids Explained, where a professor in the UK had built a home flume as a Quarantine project. Although our design was different, we used some of his techniques to try and improve the previous design. When we came to terms with building a completely new flume with a different design, I immediately reached out to the owner of the channel. Being an educator, he was very responsive and helpful with our design, despite me being initially nervous about reaching out. This was an important lesson because, for the most part, creators want to see other creators succeed, and when they do something that they think was cool or fun, they want to share that with other people. So, being curious and asking lots of questions has been something I have been working on doing, and I would encourage everyone to ask as many questions as they want.
- Fluids Explained channel: https://www.youtube.com/@fluidsexplained1901
- Reference video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sppaBqpIT-w&t=213s