AEM Seminar: The Structure of Turbulence and of Granular Beds
Gregory Paul Bewley, Assistant Professor, Gordon Lankton Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University
2:30 PM on 2018-10-12
Abstract:
Fluid turbulence is fascinating in part because it seems naturally resistant to organization. With modern instrumentation, we have great control over the properties of turbulence generated in the laboratory and great resolution in the measurement of the properties. In the first part of my talk, I will introduce experiments motivated by the question of how turbulence organizes its energy among different scales of motions. The experiments employ pressurized gases, novel active grid turbulence generators, and micro-fabricated probes. The data reveal an oscillatory structure at small scales that had so far gone unnoticed. In the second part of my talk, I introduce a new experiment motivated by the question of how turbulence deforms granular beds. The experiments reveal a new mechanism that produces bedforms, a mechanism associated with pressure gradients generated in a fluid-saturated particle bed by a plate oscillating in the water above it.
Bio:
Greg Bewley is a member of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty at Cornell University and is also a graduate of the very same department. In the intervening years he was awarded a PhD from Yale University, and he crossed the ocean for an opportunity to be a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany.