Non-Stationary Non-Homogeneous Turbulence

A wide range of radical technological breakthroughs are needed across all industries and engineering because of the dramatic current climatic, environmental and population growth constraints on energy, energy efficiency, polution and emissions. Turbulent flows are a key limiting factor in a vast range of these industries including the aeronautical, automotive, chemical, pharmaceutical and environmental engineering industries to name but a few. Step-change technological innovations in these industries therefore require rapid and reliable turbulent flow prediction methods which are currently unavailable. The stalemate in turbulence prediction methods reflects an 80-year stalemate in our fundamental understanding of turbulent flows. The past 5 years, however, have seen a number of advances which overturn cornerstone turbulence textbook material and create an unprecedented opportunity for a potentially decisive breakthrough in our fundamental and general understanding of turbulent flows which are typically non-stationary and/or non-homogeneous. These recent advances concern non-stationarity and non-homogeneity in fundamental ways and open new research opportunities with many new questions and hypotheses. This project will seize these new research opportunities with a combination of laboratory, computational and theoretical methods and approaches applied to a variety of turbulent flows. The expected outcome is a transformative, entirely new and extensive, fundamental understanding and theory of non-stationary and/or non-homogeneous turbulence, and a consequent road map for future disruptive turbulent flow prediction methods.