European Turbulence Conference

Eberhard Bodenschatz

Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation
Göttingen, Germany
http://www.mpg.de/34411/dynamik_selbstorganisation_wissM14

Eberhard Bodenschatz received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Bayreuth in 1989. With his postdoctoral research at the University of California Santa Barbara he switched to experimental physics. From 1992 until 2005 he was professor of physics at Cornell University. Since 2005 he is director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, adjunct professor of Physics and of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, and since 2007 professor of physics at the University of Göttingen. His research is on the experimental investigation of nonlinear systems in physics, geophysics, biology and medicine. He is Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Cottrell Scholar, und Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is editor in chief of New Journal of Physics, a member of the editorial board of Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, a member of the advisory boards of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and of arXiv, and a director of the Materials Research Society.

Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953)

During the half century of Ludwig Prandtl’s Göttingen period, from 1904 until his death, his school extended Göttingen’s fame from mathematics to applied mechanics, a specialty which acquired in this period the status of a self-contained discipline. Prandtl had more than eighty doctoral students, among them Heinrich Blasius, Theodore von Kármán, Max Munk, Johann Nikuradse, Walter Tollmien, Hermann Schlichting, Carl Wieghardt, and others who, like Prandtl, perceived fluid mechanics in general, and turbulence in particular, as a paramount challenge to bridge the gulf between theory and practice. Prandtl’s approach towards turbulence reflects a broad spectrum of “pure” and “applied” research. Ludwig Prandtl's seminal works on the boundary layer and the mixing length concept has revolutionized fluid dynamics. His experimental work on the velocity spectrum of fully developed turbulence lead him before the end of WWII to the derivation of a energy cascade model that he closed at the Kolmogorov dissipation length scale.

Gregory Falkovich

Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot, Israel
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/home/fnfal/

Gregory Falkovich got PhD from Nuclear Physics Inst. Novosibirsk in 1984, worked in Russian Ac. Sci. Since  1991 at the Weizmann Institute Science, from postdoc to professor and department head. Section Editor of J. Phys. A, Editorial boards of J. Stat. Mechanics, J. Stat. Physics. Got 4 awards of the Russian Acc. Sci., one in Israel. Elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London. Authored a textbook on Fluid Mechanics and a monograph on Turbulence.

Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (1903-1987)
and the Russian school

Under one of the most oppressive regimes in the twentieth century, in the country, which lost most of its educated class to emigration, civil war and terror, and was often plagued by war, diseases, poverty and hunger, great mathematical and physical schools flourished. Kolmogorov and Landau each created a great school. In the lecture, I describe how the interaction of these two schools over the period of thirty years lead to several remarkable advances in the theory of turbulence.

Uriel Frisch

Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur (CNRS)
Nice, France
http://www.oca.eu/uriel/curri_uf_engl.html

Uriel Frisch works at the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur and the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis. He got his PhD in 1967 on the subject of wave propagation in random media and stochastic equations. Since 1964 he has been interacting with Robert Kraichnan and got increasingly involved in the theory and simulations of turbulence (fluid and MHD). With G. Parisi he developed the theory of multifractals. With B. Hasslacher and Y. Pomeau he developed the Boolean simulation method of lattice gas automata, which later morphed into Lattice Boltzmann methods. He also worked on the application of optimal transport to the reconstruction of the dynamical history of the Universe. He has a signaificant activity in history of science and is an editor of EPJ H (H for "history").

Robert Harry Kraichnan (1928-2008)

Robert Harry Kraichnan (1928-2008) was one of the leaders in the theory of turbulence for a span of about forty years (mid-fifties to mid-nineties). Among his many contributions, he is perhaps best known for his work on the inverse energy cascade (i.e. from small to large scales) for forced two-dimensional turbulence. This will be a review of Kraichnan's main scientific contributions.

The paper on Robert Kraichnan (see arXiv:1011.2383v1 [physics.hist-ph]) was written with G. Eyink (Johns Hopkins, Baltimore), a specialist of the application of statisitical physics and field theory to turbulence who also had considerable interaction with Kraichnan.

Brian Launder

Brian Launder obtained his doctorate from the Gas Turbine Lab at MIT for experimental research on laminarization of turbulent boundary layers before joining Imperial College where he worked for twelve years helping to develop much of the early definitive work on turbulence modelling. After a 4-year spell at UC Davis he returned to the UK in 1980 to head the Thermo-Fluids Division at UMIST. His group in Manchester has developed an international reputation in the development and application of turbulence modelling strategies over a wide range of engineering phenomena and problems. His achievements have been recognized by his admission to the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering and The Royal Society and by the conferment of honorary doctorates by three European universities. In Summer 2011 CUP will publish the book Turbulence Modelling for Engineering and the Environment co-authored with his first PhD student and friend on more than forty years, Kemo Hanjalić.

Lecture on

Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912)

Much has already been written on Osborne Reynolds whose experimental and theoretical work on turbulent flows laid the foundation for a large proportion of turbulence research over the century following its publication. The lecture will therefore give most attention to the less known underlying infrastructure of his life with its associated personal triumphs and tragedies.

From his appointment in 1868 at the age of 25 as the first full-time professor of engineering in England to his enforced early retirement in 1903 with what today might be diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, Reynolds’ insight and intellectual tenacity shaped not just the evolution of turbulent flow analysis but also the theory of lubrication, the design of the steam turbine and the determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat to within 0.2% of today’s accepted value. Yet, his remarkable 1895 ‘Reynolds averaging’ paper (which provides not only the Reynolds equations but the first derivation of the turbulence energy equation and mass-weighted averaging) was published only after being harshly criticized by two eminent referees.

Ivan Marusic

University of Melbourne
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.mech.unimelb.edu.au/people/staff/ivan_marusic.html

Ivan Marusic is a Professor and Federation Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and prior to returning to Australia in 2007 was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, where he was a recipient of an NSF Career Award and a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, President of Australasian Fluid Mechanics Society, and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and Editor of Experimental Thermal and Fluid Sciences.

Albert Alan Townsend (1917-2010)

Alan Townsend started his research career as a nuclear physicist, but made the transition to the study of turbulence upon encouragement from his friend and fellow Australian George K. Batchelor. Both were students of G.I. Taylor. Townsend’s years at the Cavendish Laboratory were noted with the first experimental studies on the small-scales of turbulence, and insightful studies into organized eddy structures. These topics and Townsend’s journey in the field will be reviewed in the lecture.

Keith Moffatt

University of Cambridge
DAMTP
http://moffatt.tc

Keith Moffatt is Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge. His research speciality is Fluid Dynamics, and particularly Magnetohydrodynamics and the theory of the Geodynamo. He served as Director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, UK from 1996-2001. He has had a long association with the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM), having served as President (2000-2004) and Vice-President (2004-2008). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and a foreign member of several other national academies

George Keith Batchelor (1920-2000)

George Batchelor, graduate of Melbourne University, arrived in Cambridge, UK, in April 1945 during the final months of World War II, to undertake research in turbulence under the supervision of Sir Geoffrey (G.I.) Taylor, Royal Society Research Professor at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Just seventeen months later, Batchelor presented a paper at the VIth Congress of Applied Mechanics in Paris that was to define the subsequent course of research in turbulence in the Western World. This was his exposition and interpretation of the Kolmogorov/Obukhov theory of turbulence which had been unknown outside the Soviet Union throughout the war years. Over the next fifteen years, Batchelor gained a reputation as a dynamic and visionary leader of research in turbulence. His 1953 monograph  "The Theory of Homogeneous Turbulence" was a landmark publication; and his work on turbulent diffusion was of lasting significance. He left an indelible mark on the subject, and exerted enormous influence in three ways: through the creation in the 1950s of the renowned turbulence research school in Cambridge; through the foundation in 1956 of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, which, under his scrupulous editorship over the next 40 years, was destined to attract the best papers in the subject worldwide; and through the foundation in 1965 of EUROMECH, and the great stimulus that this gave to research interaction at the European level.

Roddam Narasimha

Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research Engineering Mechanics Unit
Jakkur, Bangalore, India
http://www.jncasr.ac.in/roddam

Roddam Narasimha obtained his Master’s degree by research at the Indian Institute of Science as a student of Satish Dhawan and PhD at Caltech with Hans Liepmann.  He is currently at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research at Bangalore. His work has been concerned chiefly with turbulent shear flows, transition, relaminarization, memory of free shear flows, the bursting phenomenon and its links to outer flow in the boundary layer and, most recently, with convective boundary layers in the atmosphere and cumulus cloud flows in the laboratory. He has spent most of his professional life at IISc (at the Department of Aerospace Engineering and the Centre for Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences), and headed the National Aerospace Laboratories for nine years.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering and of Sciences, and was President of the Indian Academy of Sciences during 1992-94.

Satish Dhawan (1920-2002)

Satish Dhawan got his Doctor’s degree as a student of Hans Liepmann at Caltech. He returned to India in 1951, joined the Department of Aeronautical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and continued at IISc for the rest of his professional life in various capacities.  At Caltech he made (with Liepmann and Roshko) pioneering studies on shock boundary layer interaction and, for his thesis, made direct measurements of skin friction on a flat plate at a time when boundary layer theory was still thought to need stronger experimental support. He founded experimental studies of turbulent flows in India by building a laboratory at IISc, and (with Narasimha) provided the first successful bridge between Emmons’s spot theory and the intermittency measurements of Schubauer & Klebanoff. He was an outstanding scientific leader who transformed the institutions he headed (such as IISc and the Indian Space Research Organization). He was a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering, and President of the Indian Academy of Sciences during 1977-79, and was conferred some of the highest civilian honours in India for his services to the country.

Norbert Peters

RWTH Aachen
Institute for Combustion Technology
Aachen, Germany
http://www.itv.rwth-aachen.de/index.php?id=70&L=5

Norbert Peters is Emeritus Professor at the RWTH Aachen University. His research interests are in combustion fundamentals and in turbulence. He has been Associate Editor of Combustion and Flame and of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and has authored a monograph on Turbulent Combustion. He has spent a year and a quarter as professor at the Center for Turbulence Research of Stanford University. He is recipient of the Leibniz-Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Brussels, Darmstadt and Zürich. He is member of two German academies and Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering (USA).

Theodore von Karman (1881-1963)

Theodore von Karman, having graduated from the Technical University of Budapest, joined Ludwig Prandtl in 1908 in Göttingen for his Ph.D. in solid mechanics on a theory of buckling. At Göttingen he soon became interested in fluid mechanics and made his famous stability analysis of a vortex street in the flow behind a cylinder. In 1912 he accepted the chair of Aerodynamics and Mechanics at the Technical University of Aachen where he later developed the logarithmic law of the wall for turbulent channel and boundary layer flows. In 1929 von Karman decided to move to Pasadena as Professor of Aeronautics and Director of the Aeronautical Laboratory. He became interested in rocket research and was Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1938 to 1945. It was during his time at Caltech that he made considerable contributions to the theory of isotropic turbulence.

Dale Pullin

California Institute of Technolgy (CALTECH)
Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories (GALCIT)
Pasadena CA, USA
http://www.galcit.caltech.edu/people/faculty/pullin.html

Dale Pullin is the von  Karman professor of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology.  His undergraduate  major at the University of Sydney  was aeronautical engineering  and he received his PhD in Aeronautics from Imperial College London in 1974. His research interests are in the areas of theoretical and computational fluid mechanics; rarefied gas dynamics, vortex dynamics, compressible flow, shock-wave dynamics, hydrodynamic stability, turbulence and turbulent mixing, combustion, magnetohydrodynamics and numerical algorithms for computational fluid dynamics

Philip Geoffrey Saffman (1931-2008)

Philip G. Saffman was a leading theoretical fluid dynamicist of the second half of the twentieth century.  He worked in many different sub-fields of fluid dynamics and,  while his impact in other areas perhaps exceeded that in turbulence research,  his contributions to the theory of turbulence were significant and remain relevant today.   He was also an incisive and, some might conclude, a somewhat harsh critic of progress or what he perceived as  the lack thereof, in solving ``the turbulence problem''.  This extended to his own work;  in a preface to lectures on homogeneous turbulence in 1968 he stated  that  `` .. the ideas ... are new and hopefully important, but are speculative and quite possibly in serious error...''    This presentation will try to survey Saffman's thinking and contribution to turbulence research from the mid 1950's, when he began  to mature as a scholar, until the late 1970's when he moved away from the study of turbulence to concentrate on the related but separate area of the  dynamics of isolated and interacting vortices.

James J. Riley

University of Washington
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Seattle WA, USA
http://an.me.washington.edu/stage.new/research/faculty/rileyj/

Jim Riley, the PACCAR Professor of Engineering, is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and an Adjunct Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington.  He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in 1972, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  His research interests include a broad range of problems in fluid mechanics, most recently being turbulent reacting flows and waves and turbulence in density-stratified fluids.  Riley is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; he is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, is a member of the Editorial Committee for the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, and is also an Associate Editor of the Applied Mechanics Reviews and of the Journal of Turbulence.

Stanley Corrsin (1920-1986)

Stan Corrsin, an immigrants' son from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received his PhD from Caltech in 1947, working at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory with Theodore von Karman, Clark Millikan, and his PhD advisor, Hans Liepmann.  He joined the Johns Hopkins University in 1948, where he remained for the rest of his life.  During his career he made major contributions in many areas of fluid mechanics and especially turbulence, including turbulence intermittency, turbulent heat transfer, the structure of turbulent scalar fields, the geometry of small-scale turbulence, homogeneous decaying and homogeneous shearing turbulence, and turbulent reacting flows.  In addition to his research, Corrsin was also well-known as an educator and collaborator, attracting many graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and visitors to his laboratory and to the University.  In this lecture Corrsin's life, some of his major research accomplishments, and the research environment at the time at Hopkins will be related.

Katepalli R. Sreenivasan

New York University
Department of Physics
New York NY, USA
http://physics.as.nyu.edu/object/KatepalliRSreenivasan.html

Katepalli R. Sreenivasan taught at Yale for twenty-two years from 1979, and moved to the University of Maryland for a year and a half before being appointed the Director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (ICTP), Italy, where he held a concurrent professorship. He is presently the University Professor in New York University, with joint appointments in Physics Department and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; for half the time, he also serves as the Senior vice Provost at NYU. He has been a visiting professor at Caltech, Rockefeller University and Cambridge University, and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, among others. He is the author of some 250 research papers on areas broadly related to fluid mechanics, has supervised more than 30 Ph.D. theses and mentored numerous students at Yale and elsewhere, especially at ICTP. Among the academies to which Sreenivasan has been elected are the US National Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of several prizes and honors and of three honorary doctorates.

Geoffrey Ingram Taylor (1886-1975)

Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, who died at the age of 89, was one of the great scientists of his time. His research work between 1909 and 1973 left an indelible mark on every subject he touched. His complete lack of pomposity in written words (as apparently in person) made him a revered person to his many friends in Cambridge and elsewhere. He was regarded as very special by those who knew him well. To fluid dynamicists in the world at large, Taylor remains a giant. My talk will touch upon Taylor's turbulence work, his interactions with his peers, and his personality.