Events Calendar

AME Seminar

Speaker: Mitul Luhar, USC

Talk Title: Tunable Porous and Patterned Surfaces for Turbulence Control

Abstract: Control of wall-bounded turbulent flows has been an important area of research for several decades. However, the development of effective control techniques has been hindered by the limited availability of computationally tractable models that can guide design and optimization. This talk describes extensions of the resolvent analysis formalism that seek to address this limitation. Under the resolvent formulation, the turbulent velocity field is expressed as a superposition of propagating modes (resolvent modes) identified via a gain-based decomposition of the Navier-Stokes equations. Control is introduced into this framework via changes to the boundary conditions or through additional forcing terms in the governing equations. These changes alter the structure and gain of resolvent modes, whereby a reduction in gain is shown to be indicative of mode suppression and drag reduction. This modeling framework reproduces previous observations for passive control techniques such as sharkskin-inspired riblets, compliant walls, and anisotropic porous materials with minimal computation. Ongoing work builds on these observations to develop optimization routines for riblet shape and to design, fabricate, and test porous materials that can passively control turbulent flows

Biography: Mitul Luhar joined the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at USC as Assistant Professor in January 2015 and was appointed as the Henry Salvatori Early Career Chair in 2020. He has received the AFOSR Young Investigator Program award as well as the NSF Career award. Prior to joining USC, Mitul was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at Caltech. He earned his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT in 2012, and his B.A. and M.Eng. degrees in Engineering from Cambridge University in 2007.

Host: AME Department

More Info: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96299159490

Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96299159490

Location: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96299159490

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96299159490

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Tessa Yao

Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96299159490