Lighthill Lecture 2019

Lighthill Lecture 2019

Progress in Multiscale Physics and Modeling of Fluid Turbulence

In recent years, there has been a tremendous growth of activity on multiscale physics and modeling of fluid turbulence. In particular, an idea of Reynolds stress constrained large eddy simulation (RSC-LES) has been developed for simulating wall-bounded turbulent flows with massive separation and high Mach number thermal flows. Our model is able to solve the traditional log-layer mismatch problem in RANS/LES approaches and can predict mean velocity, turbulent stress and skin friction coefficients more accurately than traditional pure dynamic large eddy models and detached eddy simulation using the same grid resolution. Our results demonstrate the capability of multiscale simulation methods for complex fluid systems and the necessity of physical constraints on the multiscale methods.

A brief review on recent research progress at the State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems in China will also be presented, including Lagrangian structures of fluid turbulence, multiple state turbulence and hypersonic aerodynamic heating mechanism.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Shiyi Chen is a chair professor in the Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering at Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China.

He received BS degree in Mechanics from Zhejiang University, China in 1982 and MS and PhD from Peking University in 1985 and 1987, respectively. After completing his PhD at Peking University, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was an Oppenheimer Fellow, Fellow of LANL and served as the Deputy Director of the Center for Nonlinear Studies. From 1994 to 1997, he was a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Division. During 1999-2005, he was appointed the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Chair professor in Engineering and Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Prof. Chen was the founding dean of the College of Engineering at Peking University in 2005. He served for the University as the Dean of Graduate School and Vice-President for Research. In 2015, Prof. Chen became the second President of Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China.
Chen's research interest is broad, including statistical theory and computation of fluid turbulence, multiscale modeling and simulations of micro- and nano-fluidics, mesoscopic physics and lattice Boltzmann computational methods. He is one of the pioneers in the development of the lattice Boltzmann method. Chen has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and been cited more than 17,000 times in SCI.

Chen was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Institute of Physics and Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is an elected member of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Third World Academy of Sciences.