A high school student’s science fair project led to a groundbreaking discovery about the influence of container elasticity on the way fluids drain, with surprising implications for various industries.
Glugging Revealed
Rohit Velankar, a high-school senior, was pouring juice into a glass when he heard an instrument—how the sound interacts with its environment can discern its character—in this case, it sent a rhythmic glug-glug-glug beating against the carton walls. Fascinated by this phenomenon, Rohit pored over the literature examining how changing one’s container’s elasticity modifies how fluid drains from it.
He started out by pondering this very question in his science fair project and from there, his curiosity just began to snowball. Rohit Velankar, left, partners with his father, Sachin Velankar, a professor in the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Department in the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.
A Father-Son Collaboration
Meanwhile, the Velankar duo conducted experiments in the family’s basement, hoping to get to the bottom of what was behind the glugging effect. Their results appear in their debut father-son team paper, “Fluid dynamics models of COVID spreads: How air flow matters,” which was published today in the Journal Physics of Fluids.
Sachin Velankar said: ‘As a scientist, I almost started to care about the project’ We decided that once we embarked on the experiments, we would have to finish it out.
Together, the father and son duo utilized their own wellsprings of lessons, nuggets of wisdom & experience to boldly go where no demonstration of fluid phenomena previously ventured.
Conclusion
What started as a science fair project for Rohit has evolved into an earth shattering discovery that will help to revolutionize industries ranging from medical devices to packaging. The Velankar team’s discovery revealing that fluid flow, and thus container elasticity in general, could open up new pathways for more effective and sustainable solutions across a number of applications. When this research is the result of a father and son working together, it not only pushes science forward but also stands as an example to all the interlocutors through whom energy flows for how interests and questions can lead to great work.
