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Show THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT EXPERTS ON TEACHING UNDERSTANDING AERODYNAMIC DRAG THROUGH NUMBERICAL SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTS Matt Ball (Meredith Metzger) Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Utah The teaching concepts used in the required introductory fluid mechanics course is seriously lacking in the transition from textbook learning into real life design. This project aims to provide the first step in a comprehensive learning module capable of bridging the gap between conceptual knowledge and practical application. Drag is a force that opposes the relative motion of an object and is sometimes called fluid resistance. Understanding drag is vital to innovation in all engineering fields that involve movement, for example the aerospace and automotive industries. For this reason, the project combines experimental, computational, and laboratory exercises that focus on drag and can be incorporated directly into the fluid mechanics courses. Drag can be taught conceptually using a simple equation. Perhaps the most difficult part of understanding drag, is visualizing its effects on different shapes and sizes. An effective m o d e of teaching students to visualize the effects of drag on an object is by having the student personally perform the numerical simulations, and experiments. For the module a fully mechanical system was designed to measure finite drag forces on objects. The difficulty is that the mechanical system needs to be extremely sensitive. Several paths to achieve a mechanical advantage were investigated, and the final design was chosen to be a weighted lever arm that creates an opposition to the drag force by using gravity. In the classroom, students will learn to calculate the drag over simple objects such as a sphere. The students will then be asked to use this same process to model an object of their choosing, and calculate the drag forces on that object. The'hands on' part of this learning module involves the student building that same object and testing it using the mechanical measuring system developed. With modern technologies, students can build their objects in a 3-D modeling program such as SolidWorks.Then those objects can be printed on a 3-D printer that will give the object exact dimensions chosen by the student. Matt Ball Meredith Metzger |