A thermal engineering design project requiring the design, construction, and operation of an apparatus that measures the viscosity of water as a function of temperature is described in this paper. The author's design employed a rotating cylinder viscometer with a transient analysis to obtain water viscosity in the temperature range of 0° to 30 °C. A class of junior mechanical engineering students, working in teams, produced designs using capillary tubes, falling spheres, and rotating cylinders. Collectively there were 432 data points. Most of the data clustered rather well around the published viscosity curve.
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