Work in progress - the redesign of a fluid mechanics lab

Most fluid labs were built back in the 1960-1970 time frames and consisted of large facilities that included flumes, wind tunnels, pump stations, wet wells, etc. Today these labs are out dated and the need for lab space is forcing the closing of large scale labs. This same basic problem exists within the Engineering School at the University of Pittsburgh, thus over the past two years we have begun the task of removing all the old equipment and replacing it with small bench top scale experiments. This paper will describe the concepts behind the design of the new experiments and the learning improvements discovered as a result of moving from a few large experiments to a large number of small scale experiments.