Abstract:  Studies of the flow between rotating concentric cylinders has provided many insights into the transition to turbulence in shear flows. The turbulence state has received much less attention, but the many tunable parameters in Taylor-Couette flow should make it an interesting laboratory for studying turbulent shear flows in different settings. Several aspects will be addressed using theory and direct numerical simulations: the limits to Keplerian flows, plane Couette flow and rotating plane Couette flow; the formally exact relations between Rayleigh-Benard and Taylor-Couette; the breakdown of the turbulence near the outer cylinder for the case of strong counterrotation; enhanced drag near the inner cylinder for weak counter-rotation; changes in the turbulence in the rotating plane Couette limit. A comparison to experiments in Maryland, Twente and Cottbus will be given.

Bio:  Bruno Eckhardt holds a chair in theoretical physics at the Philipps-University of Marburg. He obtained his PhD from the University of Bremen in 1986 and has held visiting positions at the Weizmann Institute, University of California at San Diego, the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara and the University of Maryland, College Park. Since 2009 he has an adjunct appointment at TU Delft. Prof. Eckhardt’s interests range from low to high Reynolds number flows, covering chaotic mixing and synchronization of cilia as well as turbulence transition in pipe flow and the formation of localized turbulent patches, or the scaling and statistical properties of fully developed turbulence. He likes applications of ideas from dynamical systems and statistical mechanics to flows and is fascinated by the wide variety of fluid phenomena still awaiting an explanation. He is an author or coauthor of 3 books and about 180 papers. Prof. Eckhardt is a Fellow of EUROMECH, of the American Physical Society and of the Institute of Physics, London. In 2002, he was awarded the Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation. He is associate editor for Physical Review E and responsible for its Fluid Mechanics section. He is editor of Physik Journal and serves on the editorial board of Nonlinearity and Journal of Nonlinear Science.

Host: Prof. Eckart Meiburg