MULTITURB · A Multidisciplinary Approach to Turbulence

Turbulent flows are pervasive in industry and nature. Breakthroughs in their understanding can therefore have multi-billion dollar impacts. History has ample examples that a better understanding of the physics leads to better engineering. This is a proposal to study the physics of turbulent motions. The primary research value from the proposed exchange would be the opportunity to pursue jointly three new and emerging areas of research. First, to start for the first time a systematic international multidisciplinary research programme at Imperial College London on the role of initial and upstream conditions in turbulence. Second, to explore how the turbulence is generated and acquires and/or loses its energy, and how the mean flow profiles are created as a result. Third, to exploit the full scale similarity of turbulent jets to carry out a direct numerical simulation (DNS) which increases by nearly an order of magnitude the Reynolds number and downstream distance of present numerical computations. All three of these tasks represent a convergence of several long-term interests as well as important extensions into the new paths and opportunities which clearly need to be taken by the proposed Visiting Fellow, William K. George, and faculty at Imperial College London; in particular, Professors J. D. Gibbon, J.C. Vassilicos, W. P. Jones, X. Wu and Dr. B. van Wachem. This is also a unique opportunity to invest new knowledge and training in applied mathematics and computational fluid dynamics in the proposed fellow. This will result in an unprecedented multidisciplinary combination of expertise of unique power and effectiveness which will both be of enormous benefit to him, and enhance his future contributions to the field of turbulent fluid dynamics in Europe.