2022 was a year of transition. I received a post-doc fellowship at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands to study cuttlefish biomechanics and develop new soft robots. We moved in July and are still working to settle in here in NL. The research has been altogether new and fascinating. I’ve been mentoring undergraduate students while they work on theses […]
Category: Fluid Mechanics
How to swap the bearings in a Leybold Turbovac 150 turbo pump
The bearings went out on our reactor turbo pump. It started making a loud whine. A rebuilt Leybold 150 costs like $4000, so swapping them out myself seemed like the only real option. Here’s how it went: Step 1: Remove the heatsink and housing. Use a metric allen wrench to remove the housing. It’s got a rubber o-ring holding it […]
Designing a 3D-printed flow chamber
I’m working on a small, water-tight chamber to measure how flow affects feeding kinematics in Vorticella, a single-celled protist that adheres to surfaces. There are some real design constraints, namely that it must be small enough to accommodate the relatively short (10mm) working distance of the objective lens we’re using. I designed a prototype in Solidworks. The clear interrogation area […]