2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Hands-on laboratory experiments are a standard component of many introductory college-level courses in fluid dynamics. When done well, such exercises form a key component of an active-learning framework (Michael 2006), providing an opportunity to reflect on and test students’ conceptualization of theoretical tools central to the subject. Traditionally, these instructional experiments are performed in a dedicated laboratory space with large and expensive equipment, which often limits the opportunities for students to work creatively with the devices and critically explore the principles they are tasked with testing.

One means to mitigate the shortcomings of a centralized laboratory would be to provide experimentation kits that each student can use in their own residence. The obvious challenges to this approach are size and cost, though they are continually reduced by the advancement of more sophisticated consumer technology. Indeed, our current work was inspired by the success that our institution had with flipping the mechanical engineering electronics course sequence to “at-home” labs in 2015 utilizing miniature USB oscilloscopes, function generators and arduino microcontrollers. While we were not the first to see the benefits of this approach (see for example Long, Horan & Hall 2012), we quickly appreciated students' enhanced interest and sense of mastery of the material, as evidenced by an increased use of electronics and sensors in their senior capstone design projects. Two recent studies demonstrating the effectiveness of “at-home” kits are given by Rasnow (2024) and Sotelo et al (2022), the latter of which studied a cohort of 290 students in their comparative study, showing their enhanced appreciation of learning outcomes, intellectual challenge, and understanding of the concepts in practical applications.

In taking a similar approach to fluid dynamics laboratories, the primary hurdle comes from being able to produce compact and inexpensive devices that have sufficient precision to achieve the learning objectives. One literature-based example is Starks, et al (2017), who developed a series of 18 low-cost exercises that ranged from uncertainty analysis to momentum flux from a fan. Our current work is enabled by the advent of consumer-grade miniature ducted fans and motor controllers used in the remote controlled hobby industry, as well as low-cost DC power supplies created for residential LED lighting applications. Using a set of readily available off-the-shelf components (motor, ducted fan, motor controller, power supply), we created the basis for a modular kit to enable 6 key experiments that use the same fan housing: 1) manometry with velocity and flow rate measurement, 2) momentum flux thrust stand, 3) drag measurement wind tunnel, 4) pipe flow losses, 5) fan characteristics, and 6) boundary layers and flow separation. The current work reports on the detailed design of the thrust stand and manometer components, and preliminary results testing the prototype device with small focus groups of students. Student feedback guides our refinement of the accompanying materials to guide basic tests, aiming to encourage creative exploration and promote deeper understanding of the fundamental principles.