Sharon Waters for the Office of Engineering Communications
Jan. 29, 2021 2:30 p.m.
It started as a failed experiment.
Princeton Professor Marcus Hultmark and three Ph.D. students in his lab were testing — in water — a high-resolution temperature sensor that they had developed and used successfully for measurements in air. But then-graduate student Clayton Byers saw that the sensor was delivering backwards results: warm registered as cold and vice versa. Disappointment led to discovery as the team realized they were measuring fluid velocity, which has long proven much more difficult to measure than temperature.
Marcus Hultmark led a team that found a revolutionary new approach to measuring flow rates. “You can put it in honey, in water, in air, and the same sensor does a very good job in all of them,” he said.