This report describes the Institute for Fluid Mechanics which is part of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In particular, their unique and extremely accurate skin friction drag measuring capability is described. Current research is concentrated on flows in ducts with bends or undergoing rotation, and on flows in duct junctions. A key goal of the several lines of research is to be able to compute the internal flows of turbine blade passages. The research group has since grown to about ten professionals.
Current emphasis is on thank and artillery applications of rail guns.
To date, they have built a two meter rail gun which is housed in an instrumented 300 meter range. Palmer' s report includes comments on papers presented at the Bjerknes Memorial Symposium. Several interesting projects from Technion were reviewed during a visit in November. Dr. Spitzer is involved in single cell recording in the visual areas of Macaque monkeys and relating responses to task difficulty and selective attention. Dr. Hadani is researching mathematical models for human space perception and dynamic visual information as they relate to machine vision and robotics.