The Bio Fluid Mechanics Laboratory is located in Room 115 of the Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) Building. State of the art computational facilities and rheometric equipment for biomaterials testing are housed within the 800 square feet lab space.

COMPUTATIONAL FACILITIES

The lab server is a Sun Enterprise 450 with the following features

  • 4 Sparc 2 CPUs rated at 300 MHz
  • 1.2 GB RAM
  • 40 GB Harddrive
  • automated tape drive system for daily backup of stored data

The lab server can be accessed remotely and from the following workstations in the lab
  • Sun Sparc 4 Workstation
  • Sun Sparc 5 Workstation
  • Dell PC with 400 Mhz CPU and Microsoft Office, Matlab, MatchCad, Adobe Illustrator, Axum and Fortran compiler
The computational lab facilities are supplemented by computational facilities available to the UMBC community, including the University Super Computer Silicon Graphics (SGI) Power Challenge-XL featuring
  • 20-R10000 based processors (300mips/100Mflops each),
  • 2000MB of RAM,
  • 75 Gigabytes of high speed disk storage.
The Computational Fluid Dynamics software packages Fluent and FIDAP are available in the lab. These packages are provided by Fluent Inc., through an academic licensing agreement.
  • Flunet 5.0
  • FIDAP 8.3
In house software for the simulation of cell membrane deformation based on the Immersed Boundary Method and the Boundary Integral Method are available for state of the art simulations of cell membrane-fluid interaction.

RHEOMETRIC EQUIPMENT

The lab also contains equipment for measuring the properties of both fluid and solid biomaterials.


The lab maintains a load frame for performing stress-strain measurements on soft tissues using speckle image correlation. The in house load frame enables the user to place a soft tissue sample under a known state of elongation. Images of the specimen are taken at different states of displacement, and in house digital image correlation software is used to determine the state of strain of the soft tissue sample. The force required to hold the soft tissue sample in the given state of strain is measured using a Sensotec Model 41/0838 precision load cell with full scale range of 22.5 Newtons and accuracy of 0.2%.

In addition, the lab maintains a viscometer that can be configured with cone and plate and co-centric cylinder geometries to measure the viscosity of fluids as a function of shear rate. Time varying shear rates can be applied to measure the viscoelastic properties

  • Haake CV 20 Viscometer
  • Temperature bath