Laboratory facilities
The department has a laboratory with several permanent experimental
facilities. A major facility is the MTL wind-tunnel, which is a
low-turbulence wind-tunnel with outstanding flow quality. It has a 7 m long
(1.2 m 
0.8 m) test section and a maximum speed of 69 m/s. The
turbulence level is as low as 0.02 %. It is used for a variety of long-term
research projects on turbulence and laminar-turbulent transition, and has
attracted a number of international guest researchers. Among other major
facilities we may mention:
- Supersonic wind-tunnel, 0.1m0.1m test section,
'continuously' variable Mach no. (0.7-4.0).
- Shock tube for
student laboratory exercises
- Subsonic wind-tunnel, 0.4 m 0.5 m test section, max. speed
50 m/s.
The department shares a compressor system for the high-speed
wind-tunnels with the department of vehicle technology. There are also a
number of smaller experimental apparatuses for research and student
demonstration purposes:
- small low-speed wind-tunnel for studies
of homogeneous turbulence etc.
- plane Couette flow apparatus
- curved rotating channel flow
app. for studies of instabilities due to centrifugal and
rot. effects
- Plane Poiseuille flow apparatus (2m 1 m) for
transition studies
- a small water table for student demonstrations
- Hele-Shaw cell and Taylor-Couette apparatus
- a pipe-flow facility for student exercises
The measurement systems include:
- Two Laser-Doppler Velocimeter systems
- Hot-wire anemometers
- Schlieren system with possibility for short duration double flash
exposure.
One of the LDV systems was acquired during 92/93 and is a two-component
fibre-optic system from Aerometrics. Hot-wire
anemometry is used extensively and many different types of probes
are designed and made 'in-house'. The smallest wires used have a diameter of
0.6
m and a typical length of 0.1 mm. Data sampling is carried out mainly
with Macintosh based systems.
Computers
The department has two computer systems connected to the external
computer network, and consisting of about 25 workstations (SUN, IBM), 40
Macintosh computers and a number of X-terminals. The total capacity of the
larger servers is about 300 MFLOPS (linpack 
) with 20-25 GB
disk storage available.
A significant amount of computer time has also been granted to some of the research groups within the department from international supercomputer centers.
Grants from the Göran Gustafssons Foundation has made it possible to
modernize the department computers. Three computers from the IBM RS6000
series were acquired during 93/94. The largest, a model 590, has 256MB of
primary memory and a performance of about 125 MFLOPs on
Linpack. The smaller model 375 computer has 128 MB of primary
memory. The third is a model 370 workstation. The grant from the Göran
Gustafssons Foundation enables a further step in our expansion and
modernization of the department computer resources. A model 390 workstation
with 196 MB of primary memory was installed in August 1994.
The computers are available on the KTH computer network under the names obelix, idefix and asterix, respectively. Stellan Berlin (stellanb'100mech.kth.se) is responsible for the maintenance of the computers.
The department has signed a license agreement for Microsoft software as a part of a central agreement between KTH and Microsoft. It implies that we will have a continuous supply of upgrades, new versions etc of, e.g. Word and Excel. Also manuals will be supplied through this agreement (contact person: Lars Thor).