LRRD at EGU Vienna.

Meriam prepares to welcome visitors after setting up the booth

 Our Meriam is back from Vienna, Austria, where she and Beth Fisher displayed our Em2 at the European Geosciences Union annual General Assembly.

Over ten thousand scientists, from 95 countries, attended the meeting.



Meriam visited with some old friends, like Dr. Guido Zolezzi (pictured below), and made many new ones.

A special thank you to Sebastien Castelltort, who invited Meriam to speak during a pop-up session at the Steepest Descent workshop about our color-coded-by-size modeling media. 

Dr. Guido Zolezzi (left, in red) visits the LRRD booth at EGU

Hot body velocimetry. Blow on your finger.

Emflume instrumentation entertainment. from Steve Gough on Vimeo.


Wet your finger.  Blow on it.  You can sense the cooling.

Try it with a dry finger.  You'll probably sense that, too.  Feel the cooling?

Your body works to maintain 37 °C .   Air moving past it at a lower temperature cools it, that's why you sense the cooling of your finger.

Science lit is full of "thermal anemometry"  papers, and you can buy instruments that measure airspeed this way -- a body, usually very small, is heated to a constant temperature, and the power needed to do that is a measure of fluid velocity past it.

I'm calling our work "hot body velocimetry" because there isn't a name for it in the lit, not for water.

We need to measure velocity in our new Emflume, and in our Emriver models.

Getting bloodless instruments to work as well as fingers is not so easy.  Stick your finger in moving water and you'll see.

EGU 2013, more dots on the map, thermal velocimetry.

Meriam at EGU in Vienna last week

Jim, Lily, and Nathan load three Em2 geomodels today

Our Meriam is back from EGU 2013, where she respresented us in her four languages.  She's jet-lagged and exhausted, but bears lots of good news.

Three Em2 models left this afternoon; off to do good things, way more than dots on a map to us.

Jim and I continued work on a thermal velocimeter for our models.  A nifty concept used a lot for air.  Not so easy to apply in water.

I should let this concept go for something simpler, but the physical interactions; thermodynamics, electronics, fluid mechanics, are fascinating.

Notes in instruments for thermal velocimeter R&D

Power-resistance curves for thermistors we're testing

A thermistor being tested in the flume.

Happiness at LRRD.

Today Jim and I made a thermal velocimeter work in our new Emflume. Many hours of work, and a science first.


Lily looked great in her Thai silk tie, busy talking to clients all day.  She was happy to see purchase orders for two Em2 models last Friday.


John Micheal prepped two more Em2s for shipment. We shipped three last week.


And today I made a rack to hold the fifty or so prototyping tools I use most.

A happy day for me.

And we have a booth here this week.  More on that later.

Drag body rig is anything but.

March 26 Emflume drag body velocimeter development. from Steve Gough on Vimeo.

A few times each year I have an exciting, emotional day in the lab.

When I realize I've done something that will make the world a better place. 

Watch the movie.  I loved building this drag body velocimeter and playing with it.  I can't imagine a better way for students to get a hands-on, physical, visual understanding of how moving water works.

After more work, we'll ship this worldwide, and thousands of students will use this simple, inexpensive, elegant device to love and enjoy learning like I did this week.

AWRA Spring Specialty Conference 2013

A group of visitors surround the Em2 during the networking reception Monday night.

 Nathan and I hauled an Emriver into downtown St. Louis Sunday -- in the middle of a record-setting spring snow storm that brought more than 12 inches to the area -- to exhibit at the American Water Resources Association 2013 Spring Specialty Conference.

Two of the nine scheduled exhibitors didn't make it due to canceled flights.  An already low turnout -- budget cuts forced US federal agency representatives to cancel weeks before the conference -- was even lower.

But we've had a great meeting.  We've met students and professors, state agency representatives, and professionals young and old.  We even met a young scientist -- a professor's ten-year-old daughter -- who spent some time with us last night armoring stream banks in our model.

A meeting organizer told me at the cocktail reception last night that we're the talk of the conference.

"What's cool is, even the old white guys are talking about you," he added.

This conference's theme is agricultural hydrology and water quality, so we've talked a lot about management practices related to farming, especially pollution.  By lunchtime, the water in our Em2 runs a deep emerald green from all the dye we've been using to simulate contaminants.

We've made new connections and visited with old friends.  We're especially glad to see our friends from SIU, who helped organize and sponsor the meeting.

Nathan talks about simulating flood hyrdrographs with a conference attendee.

More Emflume drag body testing.

Drag body testing in the Emflume. from Steve Gough on Vimeo.


(UPDATE:  Blogger is mangling images; sometimes days after they're posted.  We have no idea why.  Working on it, sorry.)

We need a robust, inexpensive way for students to measure water velocity in our Emflume.   Nothing on the market meets that need, so we have to do it.

A drag body sits in a stream of fluid, with a rod attached so force on it can be measured.  The Wright Brothers were pioneers here, and what I tested today is much like what they built.

Crude?  Still used in lots of research, and on the Apollo flights to measure rocket velocity.  NASA researchers learned, in the 1960's, that dimpled balls -- like golf balls -- were much more stable in streams of air, and gave better readings.

Watching these instruments bounce around today I was reminded that fluid mechanics is a tough topic.  That's why we need to build this flume in 2013, nearly 50 years after those NASA scientists learned that whiffle balls made good sensors.

Thanks to SIU colleagues Bill Hinz and Jim Garvey for the loan of a reference velocimeter.

Reference:  Reed, Wilmer, and James Lynch.  1962.  A simple fast response anemometer.  (NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA).  Journal of Applied Meteorology.