• Home
  • News
  • Two Mechanical Engineering Professors Publish...

News Story

Two Mechanical Engineering Professors Publish Articles Among Most Read in Physics of Fluids in 2012

news story image

Assistant Professor Johan Larsson and Professor Emeritus James Wallace published articles that made the list of most widely read publications in Physics of Fluids in 2012. Every year, Physics of Fluids publishes about 500 to 600 papers across all sub-fields of fluid mechanics. Larsson’s and Wallace’s articles were among 20 most read.

Wallace’s article, “Twenty years of experimental and direct numerical simulation access to the velocity tensor,” is based on a lecture by Wallace that highlighted, among the investigations of others, the results of research using a novel experimental technique that Wallace, his students and post doctorate researchers developed. This technique allowed Wallace and his team to measure the velocity gradient tensor, a fundamental property of turbulent flows that had never been fully measured before.

Larsson’s article, “Wall-modeling in large eddy simulation: Length scales, grid resolution and accuracy,” addresses enabling the use of high-fidelity simulations for turbulent flows in realistic engineering devices. This research could, for example, be used to predict the lift and drag of an aircraft in a landing configuration with higher accuracy than the simulations currently in use.

“The fact that faculty members in our department produced two out of the twenty most read papers during 2012 is quite the statement about the quality of the research into fluid mechanics in the department,” Larsson said. “Fluid mechanics is very strong at UMD, especially in ME,” Wallace said. He directs the Burgers Program for Fluid Mechanics, which brings together faculty from the Clark school and College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences through symposia and exchanges with fluid mechanics faculty from universities around the world. 

Published April 1, 2013