Michael Heisel accepts 2017-2018 Edward Silberman award
Michael Heisel, a Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering PhD student at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory was awarded the 2017-2018 Edward Silberman Award during a special SAFL seminar on January 23rd, 2018. The Silberman Award is awarded annually for outstanding research at SAFL. The fellowship award is paid for in honor of Edward Silberman by his family and friends to acknowledge his contribution to the lab. Michael received the award for his research titled, "New insights on wall turbulence from atmospheric measurements".
The focus of Michael’s research is to characterize the behavior of turbulent fluid flows as they scale from the laboratory to the field, and ultimately improve our understanding of large-scale geophysical fluid flows. Michael has conducted experiments at the Eolos wind energy field site, both in the wake of a wind turbine and in the atmospheric surface layer (ASL). His work in wind energy seeks to explain the dynamics of the meandering of wind turbine wakes. His ASL research aims to address the universality and size scaling of flow structures in turbulent boundary layers. The ASL work is part of the “snow PIV” project, an interdisciplinary collaboration at St Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL) involving the Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Engineering departments.
The award ceremony was followed with a presentation by the keynote speaker, Dr. Elie Bou-Zeid from Princeton University. His presentation was titled, "Buoyancy modulation and scalar transport in turbulent flows over smooth and rough walls."