Curious Notions

So, for those of you who have ever wondered what research looks like, wonder no more. Here are photos from the lab where I spend much of my time. This is not for the faint of heart–or those on dial-up…

First, a bit of a look at the lab itself:

Here you can essentially get the impression that the lab can be well-described by some of the following adjectives: long, narrow, and full. In case you’re wondering about the bright yellow tubes, those are air conditioning ducts that empty directly onto a supercomputing cluster in the corner.

On the right there, you can just see the microscope we solder under when making hotwire probes. Who are we?

We’re the people in the picture. Obviously.

For us, an experiment begins with calibrating our hotwires. This involves placing our equipment very precisely on the calibration rig, taming a wall of wires, turning a finicky knob and writing down the resulting numbers. As you can see from these photos, Stephanie and I, um, enjoy this. Also, we are good at it. Really!

Once we’ve calibrated the probe, one of us has to crawl inside to set up the probe on the inside of the tunnel. The other will pass the probe through the porthole, provided the monster in the tunnel doesn’t, you know, bite her hand off.

At this point, we have to position and level the probe, which we’ve developed into an art. We’re practicing for the team event in the Grad School Olympics. We’ll see you on the medal stand.

We then climb out of the wind tunnel, turn it on, set up our experimental parameters, and start the data collection. As you might guess, the tunnel is loud, and therefore, we wear some ultra-cool ear protection.

Then, of course, we crawl back inside, reposition, and repeat until we a) get done with the experiment or b) call it a day. Usually there’s at least one chocolate break in there, too.

That pretty much sums up doing an experiment. There’s data analysis, of course, but that tends to be somewhat less photogenic. But, tell you what, when I publish a paper with pretty graphs in it, I’ll be sure to let you all know about it. In the meantime, don’t you wish you had a picture of yourself in a wind tunnel?