Over the last 10 years this group has been involved with several major experimental, computational and theoretical research efforts. These efforts have been conducted to gain insight into the dynamics of turbulent flows. Insight that eventually may be used to improve the performance and efficiency of existing mechanical systems or manufacturing processes. Corporations such as Corning, General Motors, IBM, Kodak, United Technologies, and Xerox represent a small number of American manufacturers that stand to gain from an improved understanding of turbulence.
Experimentation is expensive, time consuming, and often extremely frustrating.
These flows tend to be the rule, rather than the exception in industrial applications. CFD programmers must turn to a variety of turbulence models in an attempt to estimate these flows. Experiments conducted in the backward facing step, two step, and axi-symmetric sudden expansion have been conducted to help in the efforts verify and improve these turbulence models. The thrust of the heated jet work, the swept-wing research, and the upcoming study in unsteady incipient separation is to develop low dimensional dynamical systems models of real world flows, and ultimately to develop and validate active flow control schemes. This site is maintained by Jeffrey Taylor .