Hof Group
Abstract:
Wall bounded shear flows, such as pipe, channel or Taylor-Couette, exhibit a regime of spatio-temporal intermittency, in which laminar and turbulent regions co-exist and fluctuate in both space and time. It has been proposed that the transition to turbulence in these regimes is a non-equilibrium phase transition. This phase transition is expected to be continuous one, and exhibit universal features, specifically falling in the universality class of directed percolation. I will discuss experiments from pipe and Taylor-Couette flows, that have been carried out in our group, to examine the validity of this conjecture. In conjunction with studies from other groups, the results show that there is strong evidence to support a universal transition scenario for such flows, though more work is needed to understand the applicability and limits of this universal behaviour.
Speaker Bio:
Mukund Vasudevan obtained his PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. He then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Fluid mechanics and Acoustics at the Ecole Centrale in Lyon, and subsequently at the Max Planck Institute of Dynamics and Self-Organization at Göttingen. Since 2013, he has been a member of the 'Nonlinear Dynamics and Turbulence' group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, that is headed by Björn Hof, where he mainly works on transition to turbulence in shear flows.