Upgrades to Marquette’s wind tunnel helped engineers unlock the knuckleball’s secrets. Below, a rendering of the new immersive Visualization Lab which is poised for liftoff later this fall.
The contract work that flows through the EMST lab has the advantage of paying some of the bills but, more importantly, the jobs give students the opportunity to work on real-world projects in a facility big enough to teach real life lessons. Foley contends that though students can do structural analysis on a computer or a bench top model, they don’t get that all-important sense of scale. “If you watch something that’s bigger than you buckle with a bang, you get a far deeper appreciation of structural failure!” “To me, it’s a real game-changer,” offers Dr. John Borg, P.E., associate professor of mechanical engineering, talking about the advantages of having bigger, better labs in a showcase facility like the new College of Engineering building. “When ‘60 Minutes’ came to scout the location, they were, like, Dr. John Borg ‘Wow! This is fantastic!’” Last spring brought Borg an impressive amount of attention from the national media. “It was just luck,” Borg demurs. Specifically, it was lucky that he’d been using Marquette’s new research-quality wind tunnel and helium bubble generator to explore the unique dynamics of the knuckleball, a vexing, mostly unhittable pitch that earned R.A. Dickey a Cy Young Award in 2012.
The lab’s old wind tunnel was too small to do anything but demonstrations and while blowing smoke in the wind is dramatic, it doesn’t yield much hard data. On the other hand, blowing neutral buoyancy helium bubbles, then calculating their speed and trajectory vectors using sophisticated computer algorithms, well that’s modern PIV — particle image velocimetry. “60 Minutes Sports,” “Discovery Channel” and “Popular Mechanics” all did preseason stories on Borg’s knuckleball research. “It was really fun,” Borg recalls. He also remembers having conversations with his student and research assistant, Mike Morrissey, who said, “This is great, but can I get a job in this? Do I really want to get an education in knuckleball pitching?” Borg told Mike that no one was going to hire him because he did knuckleball research. They’d hire him because he did the post-processing on all the strain rate data, and learned how to use PIV and do data reduction. Borg was right. This past spring Mike was hired by the healthcare giant Baxter International to join their PIV team. True to its design, the glass walls of the new building put engineering on display in four significant new labs that enhance and accelerate teaching and research to the benefit of a new generation of Marquette engineers.
“ The world has changed. Our students have changed. The challenges that are facing us have changed. That’s why engineering education is transforming itself.” — Dr. Robert H. Bishop, Opus Dean of Engineering marquette university college of engineering
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