Two professors in UNM’s Mechanical Engineering Department and their graduate students are putting together a shock tube research facility that will be used to better understand a little known corner of physics. A pressurized tube, combined with an extremely high speed camera able to shoot at the rate of 200 million frames per second will be able to help the researchers better understand multiphase shock acceleration flow physics, and it will allow them to establish quantum benchmarks for anyone who needs to model some processes.
The shock tube and camera will allow them to document with great precision the way droplets and particles move under controlled conditions.
Associate Professor Peter Vorobieff and Professor C. Randall Truman are co-principal investigators working on the project, which is funded by a grant from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Their work on droplets and particles will be used to verify assumptions made in modeling.
Vorobieff and Truman say this grant will give the university a testing capability that can easily be used for the next 30 years. They are currently waiting for some components to be manufactured, but have already begun working with the camera equipment to do initial tests.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu