ENDEAVOR assists OSU physics students in winning nationwide competition
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Media Contact: Kristi Wheeler | Manager, CEAT Marketing and Communications | 405-744-5831 | kristi.wheeler@okstate.edu
Oklahoma State University's College of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology (CEAT) assisted the OSU chapter of Society of Physics Students (SPS) team in winning the nationwide competition to represent the United States at the International Physics Tournament.
The United States Physicist Tournament (USPT) required teams around the world to complete 17 open problems over the course of a year. One of the questions required students to study a flag hanging down while being subject to a uniform wind. The students also had to understand under what conditions the flag started flapping and build the most accurate anemometer based on the sound of the flapping flag.
CEAT assisted SPS in building wind tunnel support. ENDEAVOR students and staff worked to build and install a wind tunnel test fixture that mounted both a flag and microphone system.
Rosty Martinez, computational physics doctoral student, is a part of SPS and assisted the team in winning first place in the USPT in December of 2022.
“We used the wind tunnel in ENDEAVOR to solve problem number six, ‘flapping flag,’” Martinez said. “We placed different flags and recorded the sound they made, then we process the data to predict the speed of the wind.”
Wendy Hall is the lab coordinator for additive manufacturing in ENDEAVOR. She worked with several students in completing this platform. Grayson Hurst, Charles Fett, Taylor Tyme and Mark Siguenza are the students who assisted her for the majority of this project.
“One of the big things they told us is that they needed something to hold a flag and something to hold a microphone,” Hall said. “From there, it's taking measurements of the wind tunnel, how we can make it fit, and then being able to adjust everything if they needed different heights or lengths away from the microphone versus the flag.”
After receiving information from SPS, Hall and her students created what they thought would work best for the competition.
“We did a lot of the modeling of it before we actually went out and had it built,” Hall said. “We like to look and see what it's going to look like and then get approval. Then we worked with Daniel Ochoa in the wood shop from the School of Architecture. He cut us a disc for our base and drilled some holes in it and we went from there.”
After the platform was built, SPS performed various experiments designed to capture the acoustic signatures for multiple flag fabrics over windspeeds ranging from 10 to 80 miles per hour.
ENDEAVOR has assisted with a wide variety of projects across the university. Hall believes having the students collaborate introduces them to the professional world by teaching them things like supply and demand as well as timelines.
“You have to collaborate with so many different people and they gain a really good understanding of how that works in a manufacturing setting,” Hall said. “So it's not just the engineer coming up with something and someone on the floor producing it. There's a whole other aspect to it in the background that nobody ever sees.”
SPS will travel to compete in the 2023 International Physicists' Tournament on April 23-29 in Paris, France. To support the team, you can send contributions to the donation website.
Story By: Bailey Sisk | basisk@okstate.edu