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MEAM Seminar: “Modeling and Analysis of Wall-bounded Turbulent Flows”
December 2, 2025 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
Most fluid flows at human scales and at moderate speeds (> 1 m/s) reach Reynolds numbers of at least 10⁴ or higher, causing even tiny disturbances to amplify and drive the flow toward turbulence. Turbulence is a broadband, continuum phenomenon: turbulent eddies of vastly different time and length scales enhance the mixing and transport of momentum, heat, and scalars through chaotic fluctuations. These processes critically affect system performance, influencing drag/lift/noise/vibration on lifting surfaces, energy-conversion efficiency (e.g., wind turbines and combustion engines), and the spread of pollutants or airborne diseases.
In this talk, I will highlight computational research from my group on modeling wall-bounded turbulent flows, analyzing laminar–turbulent transition through stability theory, and developing Lagrangian approaches for turbulent momentum transport. I will first summarize my work on wall-modeled large-eddy simulation (WMLES), a leading technique for affordable, scale-resolving simulations of wall turbulence, applied to both canonical configurations (flat plates, channels) and complex geometries (aircraft and atmospheric flows over sand dunes). I will then discuss the relevance of boundary layers with intrinsic three-dimensionality in these complex flows and present our recent efforts to understand turbulence transition originating from a three-dimensional base flow. Lastly, I will showcase our ongoing research on extracting Lagrangian information in a fully Eulerian manner—without particle tracking—which has revealed previously unseen flow phenomena that warrant further investigation.
George Ilhwan Park
Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics, University of Pennsylvania
George Park is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (ME) from Stanford University in 2014 and 2011, respectively, and his B.S. in ME from Seoul National University, South Korea in 2009. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow and an engineering research associate at the Center for Turbulence Research (Stanford) prior to joining UPenn as a faculty member. His research interests include high-fidelity numerical simulation of complex wall-bounded turbulent flows, computational methods with unstructured grids, non-equilibrium turbulent boundary layers, and fluid-structure interaction.