Experimental Physics · Fluid Metrology · Turbulence
Experimental physicist
I develop measurement techniques for characterizing fluid flow — from laser velocimetry and image-based analysis to acoustics — and study turbulence through the lens of dynamical systems.
About
I'm Chris Crowley, an experimental physicist. I spend my time figuring out how to measure things that are hard to measure.
I take hard measurement problems from idea to working prototype — working out the theory, inventing a clever (often low-cost) approach, then building and testing the instrument. I've been at it for 15+ years, from primary flow standards at NIST to turbulence experiments at Georgia Tech and Johns Hopkins.
Two kinds of problems pull me in: cheap, clever measurement — a microcontroller and a few basic circuits standing in for an expensive instrument, once you've rethought the measurement itself — and making sense of complicated datasets, where the uncertainty analysis drives the choice of model. Either way, the goal is the same: the best measurement possible.
Where I've been
Research interests
My work has centered on two intertwined areas: fluid flow metrology and fluid turbulence. Studying how to improve flow measurement made clear that turbulence sits at the heart of nearly every metering challenge — and that the tools of chaos theory and dynamical systems may finally let us predict and control it.
Maintaining primary flow standards and improving calibration — from uncertainty analysis and wind-tunnel experiments to establishing safer, non-toxic surrogate calibration fluids.
Testing a dynamical-systems description of turbulence: special unstable solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations whose connections act as a road map for where a chaotic flow goes next.
A custom fully time-resolved tomographic Particle Image Velocimetry rig captures 3-D turbulent velocity fields in Taylor–Couette flow, compared against spectral Newton–Krylov simulations.
Selected work
A selection from 10 journal articles, 17 conference papers, and 3 NIST publications — see the full list on Google Scholar →
Off the clock
I like simple, exciting demonstrations of physical principles — and I can't help running them like experiments. Each of these follows the same loop as my research: a question, a build, a measurement.
A photograph of an exploded carbon-film resistor body — and the story of how I captured it.
An in-progress low-power, pulse-width-modulated solid-state Tesla coil.
An ESP32 that pretends to be my TV speakers — so I can control them from the TV remote and my phone.
A reproduction of Iosif's index-of-refraction matching demonstration.
The search for the perfect bubble recipe — homemade, and maybe someday for sale.
The illustrated story of trading a car for a broken golf cart and reviving it.
Write a streamfunction and watch tracer particles follow the flow it defines.