Our team's Senior Design project for UMass Amherst Mech Eng Dept., we are designing and engineering a submersible flow sensor to measure velocity profile of the cross section of a rectangular water tunnel used in FSI lab at UMass Amherst.
The team consists of Mike Eaton, Samuel Cummings, Robert Cummings and myself (Toshan James)
The flow velocity is measured by sequentially releasing air bubbles in the stream using a submerged 3d printed airfoil which is magnetically coupled with a slider mechanism under the tank. At each position of the slider bubbles are released and their positions are recorded using a high speed camera and image tracking software in Matlab. Each point on the rail gives us the velocity curve for the column of water above it, thus as the slider is moved across the tunnel we can obtain the entire cross-sectional flow velocity profile as shown in the graph.
