Researchers on turbulence meet at ETSIAE

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52 researchers from around the world attended the fourth Madrid Turbulence Workshop to share their knowledge and development regarding this physical phenomenon.

Numerical simulation using large computers is the researchers ally to fully understand turbulence, a physical phenomenon characterized by its chaotic behaviour and whose understanding is so complex that every small step forward is a great achievement for the scientific community.

In that pursuit of new developments and more simplified models, 52 researchers from around the world met at the School of Aeronautical and Space Engineering (ETSIAE) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) to share knowledge, concerns, tools and to acquire new insights, approaches and perspectives within this field.

This is Madrid Turbulence Workshop reaching its fourth edition, after those held in 2013, 2015 and 2017. During a month period, researchers from Australia, United States, Canada, China, Japan, Turkey, United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden, Greece and Spain work together in groups according to their focus (DMD, Dynamic Mode Decomposition; AMD, Advection Mode Decomposition; POD, Proper Orthogonal Decomposition; Large Scales; Homogeneous Flows; Complications & Control; Theory) are gathered in Madrid.

Some of the attendees repeat their experience, since they already attended previous editions, but new members joined this new edition, after their work proposals were selected by Professor Javier Jiménez Sendín, professor emeritus at the UPM, an internationally renowned authority in this field and the organizer of this qualified experts group.

From Japan, Yutaro Mootori, a Ph.D. student at the University of Osaka, has come to "exchange views with excellent researchers," and expects his time in Madrid Turbulence Workshop allows him it to "broaden his mind.”

Professor Jiménez Sendín and his team, using their databases, will prove or reject his initial hypothesis. In addition, throughout this month, they are attending a couple of seminars given by some participants presenting their most relevant works on turbulence, since they are considered of special interest. Beside these seminars we should add two day working group meetings, one in the mid-stay of the workshop and another at the end, for the participants to present the work performed here.

Among the latest advances, there are projects pointing towards the use of artificial intelligence, thus, it would be worthy to wonder if the machines are capable of generating valid scientific theories. Recently, Professor Jiménez Sendín attended a meeting organised by the Real Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Spain, where these issues were discussed and he said: “The collaborative interaction between human beings and artificial intelligence could be compared with that of a dog and a hunter, or a horse and a rider. Everyone plays their own role, and at the end both achieve their goals. As in all relationships between very different individuals, the problem will be an eminently communication issue.”

Initiative linked to Coturb project
The fourth edition of Madrid Turbulence Workshop is covered by Coturb (Coherent Structures in Wall-bounded Turbulence) project, a five-year research project (ending in 2021) funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant . The objective of Coturb is "being able to detect large swirls and predict them most of the time. It involves testing several models of coherent structures to quantify the frequency and proximity of the flow to the wall and develop time predictions. In other words, we perform numerical simulations with large scales and use models that faithfully represent small scales so that the number of calculations is reduced and they can be integrated into simulations of real interest with satisfactory results.”

ETSIAE's researchers at the leading edge
The Fluid Dynamics Research Group, led by Professor Jiménez Sendín has become a reference point for those who work on turbulence. The professor himself received, a year ago, the EUROMECH Fluid Mechanics Prize 2018 "For his profound and lasting contributions to turbulence, notably wall turbulence, advancing our understanding through the introduction of groundbreaking physical concepts and for his pioneering work in numerical simulations of turbulent flows that have widespread educational influence.”

And in 2017, together with the young researchers José Cardesa and Alberto Vela-Martín, he reached a milestone, proving how energy propagates across turbulent flows. They solved numerically the equations governing the movement of an incomprehensible and Newtonian flow and then analyse the data in a novel way, isolating eddies of many different sizes. This led them to deduce that energy is transferred from large eddies to smaller nearby eddies and thus their results validate a theory formulated by the mathematician Kolmogorov in the 1940s. The results obtained from the five dimensions analysed (scale, time, and three-dimensional space) were so relevant that the journal Science published the article "The turbulent cascade in five dimensions".


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