In other victorious news, the first inklings of progress began stirring in my windtunnel today. With the help of the masterful George Woo, particle image velocimetry (PIV) data, the bread and butter of research papers in our lab, was successfully acquired. The PIV process is conceptually pretty simple: put particles in a flowfield, take two snapshots of their locations with a known time between pictures. Velocity = distance/time, so PIV allows you to calculate the velocity vector at any point in the flow. With the velocity field at your disposal, it's relatively easy to hash out a description of the pressure around an object, its lift, drag, and vortex wake, and a myriad of other useful pieces of information. It's a very powerful research tool. In my case, I took PIV on a the wake of the well-known (and even documented here, in this very blog) cylinder in cross flow. I'm not going to claim the code spat out velocity vectors that were accurate, but they do have directions and magnitudes, which techically makes them data.
I'm beginning to grasp why it takes so long to become a "well-baked" researcher, as my advisor puts it. Few have graduated with a Ph.D. from our lab in less than 7.5 years.
- First, you find your way around the lab, figure out where the duct tape is: 0-3 months.
- During and following this time, you read journal papers presumably related (or in my case, unrelated) to some vague project your advisor is dreaming up: 0-2 months.
- Congrats, if at some point you get funding! Mad rush to design a data-taking system, a model of some phenomenon, and determine the best of a billion ways the two could fit together: 0-5+ months.
- Then, data taking. Get comfy, this will take a while.
That's as far as I've gotten. This stuff absolutely takes time. Next I will slam my head against a windtunnel until data comes out (of the tunnel, preferably), which will take years. Somewhere in the future lies a novel idea, a paper or few, a proposal, and heaven-willing, a degree. But it's as much the process as it is the result that's important (and I suppose marketable) to making a researcher. Depth and breadth, they say. The process teaches you creativity in problem solving and perseverence in the face of constant setbacks, and it provides you with a dallop of elbow-grease to apply when the round peg doesn't fit in the square hole. The result... well, the secret to getting a result is unknown to me at this point. When I figure it out, you'll be sure to hear no matter where you're reading this, because I'll be screaming for joy at the top of my lungs. But with my new found excitement for PIV, the process has begun.
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