Turbulence Research Laboratory

Turbulence Research Laboratory

The Turbulence Research laboratory focuses on the concepts of turbulence management, which can be applied in any industry/technology dealing with fluids.

Typical examples are process, material transport, power, aerospace, marine industries and environmental aerodynamics. Thus there is enormous significance in developing and applying turbulence management strategies both from local and global perspectives.

The economic benefits and environmental advantages of such an approach can lead to significant improvement in the quality of life. Research in turbulence will also benefit industry as it will provide improved processes that will be energy and cost efficient

Experience

The Turbulence Research laboratory’s key areas of focus include:

Turbulence control and management boundary layer control, jet flow control and wake control. Fundamental of turbulence: small scale turbulence, mixing, modelling and homogeneous isotropic turbulence Turbulence computation: Direct numerical simulation, lattice Boltzmann simulation. Micro fluidics systems: Lattice Boltzmann simulation. Experimental facilities: Wind tunnels, water tunnels. Computational facility: PC cluster (17 Dual Processors PCs)

The Turbulence Group is well established for its research using:

* Wind and water tunnels
* Hot wire and laser Doppler systems

Current Projects

The international collaborations between researchers of this laboratory have been focused around experimental techniques (for example Professor Romano at La Sapienza in Rome who has significant expertise in PIV), analytical/theoretical expertise (for example, the group of Dr Anselmet at the IRPHE in Marseille) and numerical expertise (Professor Orlandi, also from La Sapienza, is an expert in DNS).

These collaborations are expected to improve the analytical/theoretical framework for assessing the interaction between the anisotropy of the large scale motion and the characteristics of the small-scale motion. The DNS work will facilitate the parametrising effort that is needed to document the statistics of the small-scale motion in different types of flows, with different boundary and initial conditions.

Equipment

This research facility has excellent equipment for measurements using different types of wind and water tunnels. The facility has also developed a hot wire anemometer unit and probes. These are complemented by data acquisition systems, computing and flow visualisation facilities.

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