MAE Seminar – Coherent structures as a dynamic skeleton of wall turbulence: equation- and data-driven progress

Details

Dear Undergraduate and Graduate Students, Faculty, and Staff,
You are invited! UF Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering’s Seminar Series
This is a perfect opportunity to enjoy some coffee, cookies, and captivating talks! These sessions feature amazing guest speakers, from academic trailblazers and industry movers to our very own faculty candidates showing off their expertise and fresh perspectives. Come for the treats, stay for the engaging discussions, and connect with fellow MAE enthusiasts. Everyone is welcome!

Coherent structures as a dynamic skeleton of wall turbulence: equation- and data-driven progress towards efficient low-order modeling

March 27, 2025, at 12:50pm, Location: MAE-A 303

Beverley J. McKeon
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Stanford

Abstract
The financial and environmental cost of turbulence is staggering: manage to quell turbulence in the thin boundary layers on the surface of a commercial airliner and you could almost halve the total aerodynamic drag, dramatically cutting fuel burn, emissions and cost of operation. Yet systems-level tools to model the underlying turbulent scale interactions or control turbulence remain relatively under-developed. Here we outline building block models for a range of coherent structures in wall-bounded turbulence and compare simple theoretical rules governing the forcing that sustains them with data-driven characterization of key nonlinear interactions. The results are used to outline a skeleton of important coherent structures and how they are driven that, for example, can be used to improve the representation of the wall region in wall-modeled LES, as well as to understand sustaining mechanisms in wall turbulence in a manner amenable to reduced order modeling. As time permits, related investigations in other flow configurations and additional lab activities will be described.

Biography
Beverley J. McKeon is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. Previously she was the Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics at the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at Caltech (GALCIT) and former Deputy Chair of the Division of Engineering & Applied Science. She received her B.A., M.A. and M.Eng. from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. She completed postdoctoral research and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at Imperial College London. Her research interests include interdisciplinary approaches to characterization and manipulation of turbulent boundary layer flows at high Reynolds number and the development of resolvent analysis and data-driven flow modeling tools. Prof. McKeon is a Fellow of the APS and the AIAA and the recipient of a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the DoD in 2017, the Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) in 2009 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2008 as well as Caltech’s Shair Program Diversity Award, Graduate Student Council Excellence in Mentoring Award and Northrop Grumman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She currently serves as co-Lead Editor of Physical Review Fluids and on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics

MAE Faculty Host: Dr. Sivaramakrishnan Balachandar