Turbulence is an unstable state of viscous fluid flow and is the most common flow regime in nature and in engineering applications. Air motion in the earth's atmosphere, ship wakes, flows in pipelines and chemical reactors are just a few examples.
Turbulence produces rapid mixing and transport of passive pollutants and particulate matters.
Analytical solutions to even the simplest turbulent flows do not exist. We believe that DNS, viewed as novel numerical experiments, continue to be a complementary tool to experiments in turbulence research. A major effort has been to increase the flow Reynolds number. This project represents a first step towards this goal by optimizing DNS codes on scalable parallel computers. Our faculty advisor, Dr. Wang, has recently developed two MPI codes to simulate homogeneous turbulence on scalable parallel computers.