Graduate Research Seminar

12.45 for 13.00 in SCR; all welcome

On Monday 1 February Dr Nagabhushana Rao Vadlamani (Junior Research Fellow in Engineering) will deliver the first of this term's Graduate Research Seminars with a talk entitled “Fasten your seatbelts – Let’s experience ‘turbulence’!’’

Turbulence is an inevitable ‘demon’ which is found everywhere; be it in the flow behind a house fly, in the solar flares erupting from the sun or as an unpleasant experience during a flight. The highly non-linear nature of turbulence and a substantial range of spatial and temporal scales involved in a turbulent flow, pose a severe challenge in accurately predicting it. It is still regarded as one of the unsolved mysteries of classical physics. Nevertheless, due to the rapid progress in computer architectures, scale-resolved numerical simulations are now possible on supercomputers. Typical applications of such simulations such as capturing the flow over intakes and within low pressure turbines of the next-generation aircraft engines will be presented. The importance of high-fidelity simulations in contrast to conventional low-order methods will be stressed. An insight into flow control mechanisms, which can improve the performance of engines, will also be addressed.

The graduate research seminar provides an opportunity for our graduate students and research fellows to discuss their work before an astute and very friendly audience. Because this mixed audience includes not only expert insiders, but also intelligent and interested outsiders, this is also an opportunity for speakers to hone their communicative skills, and for the rest of us to be exposed to unfamiliar problems, methodologies and theories.

Meetings begin at 12:45 in the Senior Combination Room, where a free buffet lunch is provided. The speakers kick off at 1:00, and finish by 1:30, giving us a quarter of an hour for questions and discussion.