Project Description
The Tully Monster, or Tullimonstum gregarium, is a strange and famous fossil aquatic organism with an odd combination of anatomical features that call its swimming ability into question. This research aims to complement digital modeling of the Tully Monster’s hydrodynamics with physical modeling of the Tully Monster model in moving water. Placing physical models of the Tully Monster into a flow of water and observing how the water flow diverts around the model and the model behaves is a useful way to investigate how the Tully Monster would have swam when it was alive. This research will involve capturing footage of a Tully Monster model suspended in the Geoscience Department’s flume tank set to a low flow speed to capture the flow of water around the model and qualitatively observe how the model reacts to the flow. Footage and image from each flume tank run can then be processed in the ImageJ software to track individual particles picked-up by the camera. Processing should be able to reveal how water diverts around the model’s body while also giving us some insight into the model’s passive stability in the water. These results will then be compared to digital models.
Tasks and Responsibilites
The student collaborator on the SURF application, would be responsible for setting-up and running each flume tank run with the suspended Tully Monster model, as well as processing the images and footage after experiments. Running the flume tank involves learning the start-up and shutdown procedures for the tank, suspending the Tully Monster model in the tank, ensuring that the flow speed in the tank is adequate for the experiment, and recording the model in the flow with a phone camera. A current PhD student in the Geoscience Department focusing on the Tully Monster’s morphology and hydrodynamics, will help the student run the experiments and process the footage after each experiment. While the experimental design should be sound, experience with functional morphology studies suggests that something will need to be adjusted after unexpected issues arise. Therefore, the student will also be responsible for helping troubleshoot the experimental methods if needed, and will likely gain experience in experimental design as part of this project. Finally, they will compare the physical results to digital computational fluid dynamics simulations.
Desired Qualifications
None Listed.