Graduate students from the Miller Lab presented their ongoing research at the 2025 TIM Fluids conference, held from April 25-27 in Gananoque, Canada. Presentation titles are listed below:

• Yeain Han – Performance of a Marine Propeller at High Reynolds Numbers Using a Compressed-Air Wind Tunnel
• Alex Scheffler-Murry – Aerodynamic Scaling of Coaxial Rotor Performance
• Colby Medina – Background Oriented Schlieren for Tip Vortex Visualization in Compressed-Air

You can find more information and download the abstracts here: https://timfluids.ca/

Congratulations to Zarif Rahman for successfully completing his Masters degree which focused on the design and characterization of the Compressed Air Wind Tunnel (CAWT). Best of luck in your future endeavors!

A new paper is available from the 2024 VFS Forum 80 Conference that discusses recent work on understanding how the size or scale (Reynolds number) of a rotor affects performance via direct measurement in the compressed air wind tunnel. You can find more info here and download the paper here: [PDF]

Dr. Miller and Dr. Sven Schmitz discussed floating offshore wind on the ‘Growing Impact’ podcast series hosted by the IEE Institute at Penn State. You can access the podcast episode and transcript here: ‘Growing Impact’ looks at wind energy, floating offshore wind turbines

Two new publications are now available, one focusing on the modeling of wind turbine rotor performance using distributed vorticity elements and the other is a study of different surface roughness geometries, one of which is similar to the hexagonal roughness found on ablated re-entry vehicle heat shields, and the corresponding influence on the streamwise turbulent flow.

You can find both publications here: https://fluids.psu.edu/publications/

 

The lab has been hard at work preparing the Penn State Compressed Air Wind Tunnel (CAWT) for shakedown runs. The flow conditioning, settling chamber, contraction, and most of the test section are in place. The fan is running and air is moving inside the facility. We are excited to share more results at the upcoming APS DFD conference in Washington, DC https://www.2023apsdfd.org/.