You’re 30,000 feet in the air, and the seatbelt sign comes on. The pilot warns of turbulence ahead, and you regret having just poured that glass of cream soda.
What follows – a few minutes of bumps, and jolts and sticky spillages – is an encounter with turbulence at a scale we can physically feel. But imperceptibly small fluid motions are just as consequential, acting to dissipate energy within the flow at large.
Engineers simulate turbulent flows to predict how technologies will perform, reducing aerodynamic drag, improving combustion, and controlling the movement of fluids through industrial systems. But calculating every motion, down to the smallest scales, typically outstrips even the capabilities of today’s supercomputers. Iván Bermejo-Moreno, associate professor at the USC Viterbi’s Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, develops methods to improve the prediction of these smaller-scale dynamics. His research group identifies structures within turbulent flows, characterizes their geometry, and analyzes how they interact.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected Bermejo-Moreno to lead a multi-institutional project funded through its Genesis Mission, a national initiative that pairs DOE’s 17 national laboratories with universities and industry to pursue AI-driven scientific discovery. The project is a collaboration between Bermejo-Moreno’s group at USC; Ricardo Vinuesa‘s group in the Aerospace Department at the University of Michigan; and computational scientists Ramesh Balakrishnan and Riccardo Balin, in the Computational Science and Leadership Computing Facility divisions at Argonne National Laboratory.
