ModSim: Green Edition

Unintentionally, both my second and third ModSim projects ended up relating to sustainability or green technology!

My second project was on passive freezers. That was a pretty stressful project. The physics was fun because I like thermodynamics, but my partner and I had lots of code problems. We ended up printing the poster two and a half hours before it was due. We had to record a six minute presentation, and we had to do three takes in under an hour.

Given how tight everything was at the end, the poster didn't turn out too badly!

Building a Passive Freezer: Taking an Active Stance on the Environment

Definitely too much text, and some of it could have been arranged better (oops...), but I was pretty happy with it, and the comments on the poster and the presentation were largely positive.

My third and final ModSim project has been about Tesla turbines. A Tesla turbine is made up of a series of disks on a shaft, all held within tight housing. A fluid, such as water or compressed air, flows in through an inlet, and due to adhesion, the fluid forms a boundary layer around the disks. Fluid continues to flow, and due to viscosity and the boundary layer, the disks get dragged along, so they spin. If you attach a generator to the turbine, you can produce electricity. The Tesla turbine isn't very efficient compared to modern bladed turbines, but it is versatile and cheap and easy to produce. It's also more useful as a pump than are bladed turbines.

My partner and I studied how geometry of the turbine impacts its power output -- we changed disk radius and the number of disks. The difference in results for varying radius and varying number of disks was interesting -- after you reach a certain number of disks, adding disks doesn't decrease the power output by too much, whereas with radius you actually reach a radius pretty quickly at which the turbine simply doesn't start spinning.

 That poster isn't printed yet, but it is done, and we present on Thursday! I'm also presenting this poster for Expo, which is Olin's end-of-semester event in which students show off the cool things they've done this semester.