Presentation Title: The Eddies and Scales of Wall Turbulence

Biography: Until 2004, Ronald J. Adrian was on the faculty of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he held the Hoeft Chair in Engineering. In 2005, he joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University, where he directs the Laboratory for Energetic Flow and Turbulence.

His research interests are the space-time structure of turbulent fluid motion, especially wall turbulence, and the development of techniques, both experimental and analytical, to explore these structures. Methods to which he has made fundamental contributions are the laser Doppler velocimeter (LDV) technique, the stochastic estimation method, and particle image velocimetry (PIV). His studies of wall turbulence using PIV coupled with direct numerical simulations (DNS) of vortex development lead to the discovery of hairpin vortex packets, one of the most prominent mechanisms producing turbulent shear stress. Recently, his experiments have lead to a new understanding of the scale and significance of very large-scale motions in wall flows.

Recent interests in precision detonators and micro-shock dynamics have lead to the development of a unique 300,000,000 frames per second micro PIV capable of measuring velocity fields behind sub-millimeter shocks propagating up to 5 km/s.

Education:
1967 B.M.E. Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota
1969 M.S. Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota
1972 Ph.D. Physics, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK