Abstract

The department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Strathclyde has year one student intake in excess of 230. These numbers make it challenging to ensure that all students engage and develop social capital autonomously. The return to full on-campus teaching post COVID-19 provided an opportunity to reinvent the induction process to address this. Significant focus was placed on ensuring engaging, interactive sessions to support the building of relationships, consistency in delivery across all groups, and promoting self-help and resilience in students, considered of particular importance, given the large cohort size challenges constant 1-2-1 support. This chapter aims to present a practical guide to developing a similar induction experience for students, applicable to a number of discipline areas. Drivers and benefits will be presented alongside lessons learned to allow the wider field to gain from the work done at the University of Strathclyde.

In this work, a series of experiments and numerical simulations performed using a Volume-of-Fluid approach were carried out to investigate the flow of miscible viscous fluid systems through microfluidic flow focusing devices with one central inlet stream (with 'Fluid 1') and two lateral inlet streams (with 'Fluid 2'). The combined effect of the fluid viscosity ratio and the inlet velocity ratio on the characteristics of the central focused outlet stream was assessed in microfluidic channels with different aspect ratios. An analytical expression for the two-dimensional (2D) case, relating the width of the central focused stream in the outlet channel with the velocity ratio and the viscosity ratio, was also derived from first principles. The analytical results are in excellent agreement with the two-dimensional numerical results, and the expression is also able to represent well the experimental findings for the configuration with an aspect ratio of 0.84. The width of the central focused outlet stream at the centre plane is seen to decrease with both the velocity ratio and the viscosity ratio. The results of the three-dimensional numerical simulations and experimental measurements are in good agreement, producing further insight into the curved interface known to exist when high viscosity contrasts are present in parallel flow systems. It was observed that the interface curvature across the depth of the channel cross section is strongly dependent on the ratio of inlet viscosities and microchannel aspect ratio, highlighting the three-dimensional (3D) nature of the flow, in which confinement plays a significant role.

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