Research with Purdue SPS
During my senior year, I acted as Vice President of Purdue’s chapter of SPS. As such in our chapter, it was one of my responsibilities to organize and carry through with projects in the club. Below highlights my involvement with the polymerized liquid rope coiling project.
While at Purdue, I was heavily involved with the Society of Physics Students (SPS) on my campus. As vice president of our chapter, I had the task of organizing club projects. Some time in early 2020, we decided to investigate the liquid rope coiling effect: the coiling of viscous fluids as they fall. Within the effect, we chose to investigate how fluid polymerization affects the coiling. We began to take some preliminary data using an hourglass dropped off in the SPS lounge that used a viscous fluid as its ‘sand’. In the fall of 2020, we spent the semester designing the experimental apparatus, standardizing data acquisition methodology, and developing a data analysis program. We eventually submitted a funding application to the national organization for SPS, receiving money to investigate our idea. (There was an article written about this from the Purdue Physics and Astronomy Website.) We then collected data of the coiling frequency as a function of fluid height to analyze. While weren’t able to complete the goals we set out when initially working on the project, we were able to see the transition of the flow from one regime to another.