College Chapter Experiment

The college experiment is a follow up experiment to a project begun two years ago in the spring of 2004 by four seniors from the UW Aerospace department. The students flew on NASA's KC-135, the "Vomit Comet", to perform a fluid mechanics experiment involving microgravity testing of acceleration functions on Rayleigh-Taylor flow. Rayleigh-Taylor flow is a fluid mechanics phenomenon involving the mixing of immiscible fluids of different densities. The key parameter tested was the rate of entrainment, or the amount of mixing over time. The applications with interest to our project include weather patterns, geophysical flows, supernovas, and inertial confinement nuclear fusion. Numerical simulations have been performed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; however these simulations lack the experimental verification necessary for any experiment. By reducing the magnitude of testing from 1g to 0.1g, the velocities, track lengths, and momentums involved also decrease by factors of 10. Our experiment in the spring of 2004 was confirmed as providing data unparalleled to any other in the world; however the results were still inconclusive.

This year with a new team are hoping to move on to the next phase of the project by learning from the previous flight. Unfortunately, the improvements are based on funding; however some issues have already been resolved. The results from this flight will supply data for a Masters thesis.