Cleaning up and some nostalgia

An old TV monitor is removed

Organization is restored

The old optic rail

Laser optics from MG

Space under test section where the PIV
laser used to live

Yesterday, Friday,  all Lundian members of the lab spent most of the day cleaning and tidying up in the wind tunnel. The reason is that we will soon get new PIV equipment and we need to free space around the test section in order to accommodate the new laser and camera set-ups. We also took the opportunity to clean out and organize the "control room" (the wind tunnel lab office), where lots of computers and monitors have accumulated over the years, which are not used anymore. The biggest operation was the removal of our first PIV laser, a 10 Hz rep rate pulsed laser from Spectra Physics. This laser has served us well and was instrumental to our first custom-built PIV system  that resulted in the first DPIV study of a live animal in free flight (Spedding, Rosén and Hedenström 2003, J Exp Biol). The same laser stayed with us when we replaced the two-camera system with one camera, which we used for our first PIV study of bat flight (Science 2007). After that we have used a stereo-PIV system and Litron laser of 200 Hz. Now it is time to get the 3rd PIV laser to the Lund wind tunnel, and we are grateful to the old equipment that has worked so well over the years. Especially the Spectra Physics laser has been very reliable, but at 10 Hz it is time for retirement. We also removed the rail of mirrors and light sheet optics from Melles Griot, which has been replaced by modern optic arms attached directly to the laser.