Robustness and Transition to Turbulence in Boundary Layer Flows

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of transition to turbulence in shear flows has been a long standing problem, and although substantial progress has been made in various directions to this effect, there is still no consistent theory. As prt of AFOSR MURI project 'Uncertainty Management in Complex Systems' at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) with John Doyle as the principal investigator, a novel theory was developed on the transition to turbulence borrowing notions from control theory. This provides a promising framework that will help explain the various experimental observations of transition to turbulence. In order to make an accurate comparison between theory, computation and experiment, a boundary layer experiment was designed using state of the art, three-dimensional, instantaneous measurement techniques. In this report we discuss the details of the experiment and its connections with the ongoing theory and computations.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADA405611

Entities

People

  • John Doyle

Organizations

  • California Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boundaries
  • Boundary Layer
  • Boundary Layer Flow
  • Boundary Layer Transition
  • Complex Systems
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Differential Equations
  • Flow
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Layers
  • Measurement
  • Mechanics
  • Navier Stokes Equations
  • Three Dimensional
  • Turbulence

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics.
  • Technical Research and Report Writing.