04/17/2018: Early hand calculations to determine the amount of fluid needed in the system.

03/26/2019: Transporting the water tunnel from the FSI lab to the HMRC at UMass.

Towards the end of my sophomore year, a new project idea was proposed in the FSI lab. The idea was to build a water tunnel system that could be assembled and used in a magnetic resonance (MR) environment to perform 3D flow visualization of porous materials. Previously, experimental studies could only examine the inlet and outlet boundary conditions of 3D specimens. Using an MRI machine would allow for a 3D visualization of the flow within a specimen.

I began working on this project in April of 2018. Given that the system was to be built from scratch, I had to start from a small prototype and demonstrate proof of concept before investing in larger and more sophisticated components for the system. As is the case with any engineering project, there were a number of trial and errors and failures along the way that I had to address. My biggest takeaway from this project was learning to troubleshoot problems and to go from design blueprints to a fully functioning product while consulting with experts in the field.

The first step of the project was to obtain the measurements needed to determine the pipe lengths and sizes for the system and to examine the space available to us at the MRI center. I spent the next few months designing and fabricating the water tunnel with the help of my lab mates and machine shop technicians at UMass.

02/10/2019: By February, the system was complete and ready for testing in the lab environment. I had designed a closed-loop PID controller that would automatically adjust the pump power to maintain the fluid flow rate at the user defined level. This was my first experience designing a controller for a project and so it was really exciting to see, first-hand, the power of control engineering in system automation.

Over the next month, I extensively tested the system to ensure it is leak proof and avoid any unforeseen accidents during the testing in the MRI environment. By the end of March, I was confident enough in the system and we began moving the system over to the Human Magentic Resonance Center (HMRC) at UMass Amherst which houses a 3T MRI machine we planned to use for our tests.

03/26/2019: One of the key features of this system was that it had to be portable and easy to assemble and disassemble. This feature was demonstrated as we were able to transport the entire system in the back of a pickup truck, while other traditional water tunnels are simply too bulky to achieve this.

04/05/2019: TEST DAY! We assembled the system and filled it water, ready for testing to begin. After a few hours of testing, we were able to obtain the results we were looking for.

After a full year of work, the project was a success!

The results of this project were published in the Journal of Biomechanics and also  presented by Suyue Han at the American Physical Society, Division of Fluid Dynamics in November of 2019.

Han, S., Currier, T., Edraki, M., Liu, B., Lynch, M., Modarres-Sadeghi, Y. Flow inside a bone scaffold: Visualization using 3D phase contrast MRI and comparison with numerical simulations. Journal of Biomechanics, 2021.