Manali Badwe ’24

Major

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Project Title

Oil Spill Remediation by Enhanced Turbulence

Presentation Link

View Manali's Presentation

Certificate(s): Robotics and Intelligent Systems

Every year, millions of gallons of waste oil enter the ocean, wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems and organisms. Cleaning up these oil spills is a costly and time-consuming process. I researched how oil spills could be remediated by using enhanced turbulence to break up the oil slick into tiny droplets. Breakage of the oil slick occurs naturally due to the turbulence produced by waves, but the process can be sped up by adding more turbulence to the system with synthetic jets. My group designed our own at-home experiments to observe this process. In addition, we used MATLAB software to analyze images of oil droplets so we could study the size distributions of the droplets to quantify our results. I gained valuable experience in the research and design process through this internship. I also learned how mechanical engineering can have many different applications in environmental studies.



Internship Year

2021

Project Category

Climate and Environmental Science

Organization(s)

Smits Fluid Mechanics Lab, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

Mentor(s)

Alexander Smits, Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Emeritus; Liuyang Ding, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering