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Engineering students win artistic competition

Team of four tops more than 75 entries
January 31, 2011
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By Russ Cooper

Source: Concordia Journal

There is beauty in engineering at Concordia. A team of students has proven it at a competition judging engineering projects on their artistic value, scientific content and originality.

The students, working with Mechanical and Industrial Engineering professor Hoi Dick Ng, developed a structure and system to photograph the wake patterns created when water flow is obstructed by a small filament. The science is simple fluid dynamics, the product is something else.

The resulting images – elegant fractal pictures more reminiscent of groovy black light posters in a rec room rather than schematics in an engineering lab – took first place at the American Physical Society’s (Division of Fluid Dynamics) 28th Annual Gallery of Fluid Motion competition in Long Beach, California.

Created by students Rocco Portaro, Amy-Lee Gunter, Mohamed Fayed and Hamid Ait Abderrahmane, the images produced were part of a larger study into the dynamics of fluid-structure interactions, or how an object moves in and around flowing fluid or air.

The team (led by Ng) constructed a 1.5-by-1 metre vertical structure that poured a sheet of water with a thin soap film on its surface. Placing a filament or an obstruction in the liquid’s flow, they created two-dimensional wake patterns, made visible by the soap and a lowpressure sodium lamp. The team then captured the wake patterns with a high-speed camera.

Three of the 10 images the team produced for the American Physical Society’s (Division of Fluid Dynamics) 28th Annual Gallery of Fluid Motion competition in November 2010. | Photos courtesy Hoi Dick Ng
Three of the 10 images the team produced for the American Physical Society’s (Division of Fluid Dynamics) 28th Annual Gallery of Fluid Motion competition in November 2010. | Photos courtesy Hoi Dick Ng

“The patterns are not by serendipity. It’s art based on science,” says Portaro. “In terms of a win, it’s a very prestigious award because you are competing with universities from all over the world.”

The study of wake patterns in fluid dynamics is useful anywhere air or fluid flows around an object – from automotive to aeronautic to structural engineering. Gunter points to the footage of the undulating Tacoma Narrows Bridge just before its collapse in 1940.

“[Winning the competition] is pretty cool. As an undergrad, you don’t expect to meet anyone from MIT, never mind beat them at an engineering contest,” Gunter says.

The project was not developed for any particular course. Rather, it was “purely research,” says Ng. He hopes these types of collaboration give his students the confidence to step out on an international stage.

“If my research funding is sufficient, I always encourage students to attend conferences to present their work in order to motivate them to work harder and to broaden their knowledge,” he says.

The group’s images will be published on the cover of a special issue of the journal Physics of Fluids. The November 2011 special issue – Album of Fluid Motion – will include a two-page article with the pictures. The work will also be permanently displayed on the Division of Fluid Dynamics gallery website of the American Physical Society (APS). The students’ poster will be showcased again at the annual APS meeting in March 2011 in Dallas, Texas.

Related links:

•    Concordia Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science
•    American Physical Society
•    Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society
•    Tacoma Narrows Bridge footage



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