Turbulence structure gets more complicated as an increasing number of modes are added together.
Turbulence is all around us-in the patterns that natural gas makes as it swirls through a transcontinental pipeline or in the drag that occurs as a plane soars through the sky. Reducing such turbulence on say, an airplane wing, would cut down on the amount of power the plane has to put out just to get through the air, thereby saving fuel. But in order to reduce turbulence-a very complicated phenomenon-you need to understand it, a task that has proven to be quite a challenge. Since 2006, Beverley McKeon, professor of aeronautics and associate director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and collaborator Ati Sharma, a senior lecturer in aerodynamics and flight mechanics at the University of Southampton in the U.K., have been working together to build models of turbulent flow. Recently, they developed a new and improved way of looking at the composition of turbulence near walls, the type of flow that dominates our everyday life. Their research could lead to significant fuel savings, as a large amount of energy is consumed by ships and planes, for example, to counteract turbulence-induced drag. Finding a way to reduce that turbulence by 30 percent would save the global economy billions of dollars in fuel costs and associated emissions annually, says McKeon, a coauthor of a study describing the new method published online in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics on July 8.
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