I'd never actually thought about it much before this blog post, but I've had an interest in problem-solving ever since I was a kid. When I was in elementary school, I used to come up with little inventions all the time and build them out of things I found around the house (most often cardboard and scotch tape, high-tech of materials that they are). I made a little box that could sort coins for you (apparently it was too inefficient to sort out my tooth-fairy money by hand), an extendable straw that enabled me to drink out of the bathroom faucet while sitting in my bedroom, and a press-down waffle cutter that could cut my Eggo's in the exact same proportion every morning (note: this one never came to full fruition, as I wasn't allowed to use any materials sharp enough to successfully cut through the waffle).
Looking back, everything I built was largely unnecessary, but it was still a chance for me to identify problems I faced in my life (and what delightfully simple problems they were back then!) and come up with a plausible and efficient solution. I've never really put two and two together before, but now that I'm thinking about it, it's no surprise I've ended up on the path that I'm on and with the academic interests that I have.
As far as a research update goes, you all got a fairly good recap of our project at the webcast on Wednesday, but I'll hit the highlights anyway. We've finished up all our testing with Newtonian fluids and have found that the symmetric depth texture reduces friction somewhat more than the linear slope depth texture and certainly more than no textures at all. We then wanted to investigate what would happen with non-Newtonian fluids, so we've mixed up several samples of polyisobutylene (PIB) in mineral oil and are now running tests with that.
This fluid is slightly shear-thinning and produces normal forces at high shear rates, which is very interesting and obviously different than what we were testing with before. We're only partway through testing right now, but so far we've observed that, while the symmetric depth texture reduces friction significantly, the linear slope depth texture hardly differs from our flat plate reference. Right now, I'm working on testing with different concentrations of the PIB solution, as well as with samples that contain PIB of a higher molecular weight than before, so it will be interesting to see if the results are dependent on either of these factors.
Hope everyone's had a good week!
Nikita
No comments:
Post a Comment