Insanity. I am so busy it scares me. Yesterday was one of the longest days ever (9AM to 11PM solid schoolwork)...but wow was I productive. This afternoon I'm trying to work on some stuff due as soon as I get home from October break (when I'll be gone the whole time); 375 HW, 315 Lab, stuff like that. I'm psyched to spend a few days with Stace, and I'm stoked to see my Mom for an hour tomorrow. Kind of bizarre, I know - but hey I'll take what I can get.

But I wanna say a thing or two about my Heat/Mass Transfer Lab Project... because I'm really getting into it. The idea is based around natural convection - which is where because a heater changes the temperature (and thus, density) of a gas locally - that gas rises and creates a bulk motion. We're going to set up a heater (cylindrical in shape) in an insulated vertical chute, and measure the resulting temperature and velocity of the steady state air that's going to blow out of the top. It's called the "chimney Effect". The thing will look like this:



It's a heating/flow phenomenon, so it can be simulated by a numerical solution to the Navier Stokes equations coupled with some known heating/density stuff.

Temperature rises locally around the heater and creates the hot jet that rises in the center.



Because the air's heated - it starts gaining velocity; looks like it's going to get going to fastest in the middle of the buoyant jet:



So that's cool. I didn't write the CFD code, or run the simulations (code written by my 12-year PhD candidate TA, simulations run by my group member). But damn, I must say that is player. I've been responsible for finding as much academic information about the project as possible - and sure enough some guys from the Netherlands did this verbatim in 1994 ("Natural Convection Around a Horizontal Circular Cylinder in Infinate Space and Within Confining Plates" - Numerical Heat Transer Part A Volume 25 pp 441-456) - complete with their own accompanied experimental/numerical results. Awesome. So for the next month or so I'm going to be consumed with building this thing and taking the data.

I think it's fair to say I'm getting into my classes quite a bit. Hopefully I'll post a entry later about my ME444 project - where we're building a toy plane based on a really interesting historical aircraft.... and it's going to look amazing.

Allright - gotta get back to work and finish as much as I can so I can goof off for break and not feel guilty! Huntsville, here I come! 5 day weekend!!!