Fluid Mechanics

Experimental, analytical, and computational fluid mechanics comprise this focus area. Turbulence plays a major part, with experimental studies of its basic structure and of its transport effects, and with analytical work directed toward the realistic modeling of turbulent flows. There is extensive collaboration, via the Internet, telephone, and fax, with researchers at Los Alamos, NASA Langley and NASA Ames Research Laboratories, Arizona State, Stanford, ICASE, the University of London, and Princeton.

The facilities in the wind tunnel lab boast a state-of-the-art, boundary-layer wind tunnel, which provides a test bed for probing the fundamental nature of turbulent flows; a custom, water-cooled, laser velocimetry system, which is capable of "ultra-near-wall" velocity measurements; a pulsed, Nd:YAG laser system, used for visualizing and mapping complex flow structures; and two multi-channel thermal anemometers with specially-designed hot-wire probes for multi-component scalar transport measurements.

Computational research in areas of turbulence, multi-phase flow, combustion, semi-conductor material manufacturing and theoretical fluid dynamics are carried out extensively utilizing the state-of-art super-computer clusters hosted at the Scientific Computing and Visualization Center.

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