High-Fidelity CFD and Applications in Environmental Fluid Flow Study

Lian Shen, Benjamin Mayhugh Associate Professor, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, and Associate Director of Research, St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota

With the growth in computer power, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been playing an increasingly important role in the study of fluid mechanics with a wide range of applications in environmental and industrial problems.  High-fidelity CFD, which is built on highly-accurate numerical schemes based on flow physics and utilizes high-performance computing on massively parallel computers, is especially valuable for faithfully capturing flow physics of complex problems and revealing the underlying dynamics.  In this talk, I am going to present a suite of numerical tools developed in my group for the simulations of nonlinear waves, atmospheric boundary layers over water bodies, and turbulence in upper oceans and lakes.  A number of our current projects related to flows in natural environment will also be introduced briefly.