A student project for AHSE1500: Foundations of Business and Entrepreneurship (taught in Spring 2006) featuring an Olin College themed tradable card game. It consists of cards of students, professors, locations, and events.
This record contains the Final Report for the project and scanned images of all the cards in the game.
This work considers the stability of an electro-osmotic microchannel flow with streamwise electrical conductivity gradients, a configuration common in microfluidic applications such as field amplified sample stacking. Previous work on such flows has focused on how streamwise conductivity gradients set a nonuniform electro-osmotic velocity which results in dispersion of the conductivity field. However, it has been known for many years that electric fields can couple with conductivity gradients to generate unstable flows. This work demonstrates that at high electric fields such an electrohydrodynamic instability arises in this configuration and the basic mechanisms are explored through numerical simulations. The instability is unique in that the nonuniform electro-osmotic flow sets the shape of the underlying conductivity field in a way that makes it susceptible to instability. While nonuniform electro-osmotic flow sets the stage, the instability is ultimately the result of electric body forces due to slight departure from electroneutrality in the fluid bulk. A simple stability map is created where two dimensionless numbers can predict system stability reasonably well, even though the system formally depends on six dimensionless groups.
The Olin Raytheon/WHOI SCOPE team is assisting WHOI in the buoy design effort by writing software tools for managing the energy budget of a deployed buoy. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) scientists are constructing buoys for the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), an NSF funded program that will construct a network of buoys for monitoring physical, chemical, geological, and biological variables in the ocean and on the sea floor. The buoys in development for the OOI by WHOI will be expected to operate for 25 years with annual maintenance. Power for an array of reprogrammable sensors will be dependent on a combination of solar and wind power generation and an on-board fuel cell replenished during the annual maintenance.