The COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the critical need for flexible mechanical engineering laboratories simultaneously deployable in multiple modalities: face-to-face, hybrid, and remote. A key element in the lesson portfolio of a forward-looking engineering instructor is economical, hands-on, accessible, “turn-key” lab activities; kits that can be deployed both in brick-and-mortar teaching labs and mailed home to remote learners. The Energy Engineering Laboratory Module (EELM™) pedagogy, described elsewhere, provides an underpinning theoretical framework and examples to achieve these features. In addition, instructional lab kits must demonstrate foundational engineering phenomena while maintaining measurement accuracy and fidelity at reasonable cost. In the energy-thermal-fluid sciences, achieving these conditions presents challenges as&nbsp;kits require energy and matter transport in real time at scales large enough to reveal measurable phenomena but not so large as to become hazardous to users. This paper presents theoretical underpinning and experimental verification of a fluid mechanics lab experiment appropriate for undergraduate engineering students that 1) meets all the above-described criteria, 2) costs less than $25 in materials, and 3) can be easily mailed to remote learners.Bernoulli’s Equation is often taught&nbsp;as the interchangeability between kinetic, potential, and pressure energy in moving fluid under energy conservation. However, the additional unsteady term, convective energy to accelerate/decelerate fluid streamlines, is almost always neglected owing to assumption of steady state. Nonetheless, the unsteady Bernoulli’s Equation models numerous fluids phenomena induced by impulsive action including water hammer, manometer oscillations, Coriolis flow metering, and the first moments of tank draining; and thus its coverage in undergraduate fluids courses is beneficial. At the core of the experiment reported in this&nbsp;paper is a 100 mL acrylic burette with manual stopcock to regulate flow. This robust instrument is commonly used in high school and lower-division college chemistry laboratories for titration. For this fluids experiment, learners fill the burette with water, determine the static water column height, and then fully open the stopcock to facilitate draining. The burette’s accurate scale and ability to drain to a precise, reproduceable volume enables transient experiments with repeatable initial conditions. Timing the draining process enough times (N ≥ 12) to conduct statistical uncertainty analysis establishes experimental drain time and uncertainty in this value.Comparing experimental results to theoretical drain time derived from Bernoulli’s Equation reveals need to consider both steady and unsteady expressions to predict drain time correctly. This lab experiment demonstrates the utility of simple and flexible activities to illuminate important energy-thermal-fluid science phenomena for&nbsp;students in multiple simultaneous learning modalities, especially remote learning.

A Fluids Experiment for Remote Learners to Test the Unsteady Bernoulli Equation Using a Burette

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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