William Filocamo ’25 Co-Authors Paper on Turbulence Imaging in Science Journal

Senior William Filocamo ’25 was part of a team whose research was published in the September issue of the International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology.

The paper, titled “Investigating the Influence of Wavelength-Specific Textured Backgrounds in Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS) Imaging,” was the result of research Filocamo and his collaborators from other schools did this summer in the Princeton Laboratory Learning Program. Through this free program, high school students work on research projects under Princeton professors and graduate students in a specific lab. Filocamo did his research in the Imaging Physics Lab.

The paper set out to determine the best wavelength of light for imaging turbulent air. Improving the accuracy of this imaging has various practical applications. For example, it could help airplanes avoid turbulence by mapping the movement of air.

At Princeton, Filocamo and his collaborators built an apparatus with 96 fans, all controlled by a program they coded. Each fan's speed could be changed individually to create different types of airflow and create an aerodynamic testing tool. The students are currently working on submitting a provisional patent application for the design. 

Filocamo says that the work he did in Regis’s Science Research Project led him to apply to the Princeton program. In his sophomore year, he worked with a computational fluid dynamics program to test the claim that the rounded corners of U-Haul trucks significantly reduce wind drag. In his junior year, he built a large-scale subsonic wind tunnel for the purposes of aeronautical design testing.