Progress in flow instability analysis and Laminar-turbulent Transition Modeling
The VKI lecture Series on "Progress in flow instability analysis and laminar-turbulent transition modeling" took place from June 2-6, 2014 at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Rhode-St-Genèse, Belgium.
Flow instability analysis plays an active role in the identification and explanation of some of the most challenging topics of fluid mechanics. Many applications, such as a heat shield design for re-entry vehicles, control surface effectiveness, air vehicles drag, heat transfer prediction in turbine blades, or even cavity unsteadiness, detached flows, buffet or aeroacoustics, just to name a few, would benefit from a detailed analysis of flow stability.
On the other side, the availability of greater computational power and improvement of measurement techniques provided in the past years more and more information on the unstable phenomena that show up at different flow regimes. These activities enabled many theoretical advances in the study of instability, empowering a significant extension of this kind of analyses to more complex flows.
In this regard the course will cover several aspects of the stability theory dealing with different phenomena and scenarios. Lectures will range from traditional linear stability method to parabolized stability equations and global stability. Moreover they will address compressible and incompressible flows stability in laminar and turbulent regimes, describing theoretical foundations, numerical methods and applications.
The directors of this VKI Lecture Series were Prof. Eusebio Valero from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Dr. Fabio Pinna of the von Karman Institute. The event was attended by 46 participants, among them 8 lecturers specialized in the field: W. Saric (Texas A§M University), S.Ozgen (Middle East Technical University), H. Reed (Texas A§M University), F. Pinna (von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics), D.S. Henningson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), E. Valero (Polytechnic University of Madrid), V. Theofilis (Polytechnic University of Madrid), O. Marxen (Imperial College London).