Patterns of Turbulence

Laurette Tuckerman CNRS

The greatest mystery in fluid dynamics, and perhaps in all of physics, is transition to turbulence. The simplest shear flow, plane Couette flow -- the flow between parallel plates moving at different velocities -- is linearly stable for all Reynolds numbers (nondimensionalized velocity gradients), but
nevertheless undergoes sudden transition to 3D turbulence at Reynolds numbers near 325. At precisely these Reynolds numbers, it was recently discovered
experimentally that there appears a steady and regular pattern of alternating wide turbulent and laminar bands, tilted at an angle with respect to the direction of motion of the bounding plates. We report on numerical simulations of this remarkable flow.

About the speaker: Laurette Tuckerman is a senior researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) at the ESPCI (Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles) in France. Prior to moving to France, she was on the mathematics faculty of the University of Texas at Austin and she obtained her bachelors and PhD from Princeton and MIT, respectively. She studies hydrodynamic instabilities using the methods of computational fluid dynamics and of bifurcation theory.