A Century of Turbulence

Abstract

This paper presents a summary of research on fluid dynamics over the past 100 years. From the very beginning, there have been two major threads in turbulence research. The first concerned the calculation of the practical effects of turbulence, primarily the momentum, heat and mass transfer, associated with the design of devices and their interaction with their environment. The other concerned the physics of the turbulence phenomenon. Both these threads were present in the initial work of Boussinesq and of Reynolds. They are still with us. The practical thread really was two threads, one is technological, and the other geophysical. The geophysical branch might well be called atmospheric and oceanic engineering, since it is motivated by a desire to calculate the effects of turbulence in order to predict the behavior of atmospheric and oceanic phenomena, in which turbulence is only one of many players. A fundamental desire to understand turbulence is not always a basic motivation.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADA398618

Entities

People

  • Akiva M. Yaglom
  • John L. Lumley

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boundary Layer
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Databases
  • Differential Equations
  • Flow Visualization
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Mechanical Phenomena
  • Mechanical Properties
  • Physical Theories
  • Physics Laboratories
  • Stratified Fluids
  • Turbulence
  • Turbulent Flow
  • Turbulent Mixing

Readers

  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers
  • Systems Analysis and Design