DEVELOPMENT OF A VIRTUAL LABORATORY OF FLUID MECHANICS FOR THE INNOVATIVE TEACHING WITHIN THE ENGINEERING DEGREE

The Bologna Plan has become a demanding process for lecturers due to the fact that a new concept of teaching has to be taken into account, i.e. traditional lectures must be combined with self-learning activities on the student's side. The student's success is thus based on the quality of the specific material developed to provide them with the required tools to assimilate and revise the theoretical and analytical concepts that are taught during the classes. This challenge is even bigger in engineering degrees, since the practical load of the courses makes necessary the development of several lab sessions, which are sometimes not enough or are simply skipped, either because of the lack of time or the lack of adapted facilities at Schools, hindering the learning. The latter could be the case of Fluids Mechanics, one of the major engineering branches, with plenty of applications and very spread in real life, and whose foundation lays on analytical theories, experiments and numerical simulations. All these facts put serious constrains to the educators, who have to design the courses in engineering degrees. The process of developing the curricula, adapting them to all the necessities imposed by the Bologna Plan, forces the instructors to use innovative and different resources to overcome the aforementioned difficulties. In this sense, e-learning arises as a powerful tool to meet these demands, and seems to be an attractive and motivating method for the students. Thus, information technologies might help to create teaching resources, such as podcasts, tutorials and graphical applications, which could be available on line for the students, giving them the possibility to assimilate and reinforce the acquired knowledge, relating it to practical applications. In order to make easier the understanding of complex Fluid Mechanics problems and aiming at rendering accessible some of the research branches and techniques of Fluid Mechanics, i.e. analysis, numerical simulations and experiments; the Fluid Mechanics Division at the University of Jaen is creating a "virtual laboratory" of Fluid Mechanics in aerodynamics. This tool consists of a graphical application which helps the student to study the flow dynamics around different bodies, theoretically, experimentally (with several advanced and well-known experimental techniques) and by means of numerical simulations. The merging of the three mainstays in the application is an innovative feature, since it allows the student to have a complete outlook of the Fluid Mechanics and to learn about the use of techniques that otherwise would be overlooked. The practical and theoretical learning process is then completed through this tool, providing the students with the option of carrying out lab sessions as often as they want.