MEMS Professors Published in Nature Computational Science

Hessam Babaee Peyman Givi

Mechanical Engineering Professors Dr. Hessam Babaee and Dr. Peyman Givi were part of a group to recently publish a paper in prestigious journal Nature Computational Science. The article is titled “A quantum-inspired approach to exploit turbulence structures.”

Using methods inspired by quantum many-body physics, the paper analyzes the structure of turbulent flows by quantifying correlations between different length scales. Turbulence and its intricate multiscale nature is a key component to understanding many natural and technological flow processes.

“Turbulence is omnipresent in our lives and being able to predict turbulent flow is critical for many science and engineering applications” Babaee notes. However, turbulence is truly a multi-scale problem. A vast range of scales must be accounted for to accurate predictions of turbulence.  State-of-the-art high-fidelity numerical simulation techniques for turbulent flow have been based on resolving all involved scales. These approaches are cost-prohibitive for most practical engineering problems in terms of computational resources. In this paper, the authors put forward a new paradigm for simulating the turbulent flow by resolving structures in the flow rather than the scales. This paper shows that this representation of the turbulent flow can lead to a significant reduction in terms of computational resources needed for turbulent flow predictions. 

German Physicist Werner Heisenberg said, "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first."  Givi said, "I do not know if relativity can help to exploit turbulence, but quantum has proven quite useful!”