A couple of weeks ago I led the charge in organising an online poster competition and a social event for the Thermo-Fluids Research Centre of which I’m a part of.

The idea for the event came from the fact many of our PhD students may have missed out on opportunities to attend conferences over the summer and present their work. It also served as a means for the research centre to come together and socialise in these challenging times.

All PhD students were encouraged to prepare posters detailing their latest research, along with a short 3-minute audio description, which were hosted online (where my knowledge of github pages certainly helped!) and voted for by members of the centre. We had some excellent posters from 12 researchers from across the research centre covering a range of topics including turbomachinery systems, multi-phase flows and screw compressors with prizes for the best posters.

You can check out the posters here.

After the poster competition, we had three rounds of an online quiz, which was great fun. Try it out for yourself below and feel free to use the questions yourself if you are so inclined!

Overall, I had a lot of fun organising the event and it was great to see some of the great research coming out from our centre. I only hope the rest of the research centre enjoyed participating as much as I did organising it!

Round 1: Say what you see

Question 1 is (of course) Thermodynamics (‘Fur’, ‘Mo’, ‘Die’ (hard), (Viet) ‘nam’, ‘ics’), but can you get the rest?

Quiz_Round1

Round 2: Name the scientist

Quiz_Round2

Round 3: Put these scientific discoveries in chronological order

  • Navier-Stokes equations
  • First commercial steam engine
  • Ideal gas law
  • Definition of a reversible process
  • Boyles law
  • First use of computers to solve fluid dynamics problems
  • Discovery of latent heat
  • First use of the term ‘entropy’