Research

The Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory is the centerpiece for research and teaching activities in experimental and computational fluid mechanics. The Laboratory was formerly known as the Hydraulics Laboratory and was renamed the EFML in 1986 to more accurately reflect the research interests of the faculty. Professor Robert Street was the Director of the EFML from 1986 to 1991, Professor Jeffrey Koseff from 1991-1996, and Professor Stephen Monismith has been the Director since 1996. At this time, the current research is focused on turbulence and mixing in natural water bodies, stratified flows in lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, and coastal seas, natural and forced convection flows in energy systems, energy and mass transfer across the ocean-atmosphere interface, simulation of mesoscale phenomena in the oceans and surface layers of the atmosphere, and transport and mixing of pollutants at regional and global scales in the atmosphere.

The EFML currently has six major experimental research facilities of which five have been built in the past eight years. These include a rotating table facility for studying geophysical flows and a flume for studying the hydrodynamics of feeding by benthic bivalves (clams). The research activities in this flume reflect the ever-growing interest in biological fluid mechanics in the EFML. Even though the program in biological fluid mechanics was only established six years ago it is already regarded as one of the leading programs of its type in the country. In addition, the EFML boasts absolutely superb computing resources, including a recently purchased CRAY mini-supercomputer and Silicon Graphics workstations, and a state-of-the-art measurement capability, some of the equipment being procured and some developed by the laboratory staff, faculty and students.

Building on the pioneering work of Professors En Yun Hsu and Robert Street on wind-generated water waves, the research program has recently added a new thrust in the atmospheric sciences with the hiring of Professor Mark Jacobson from UCLA. The intent is that Jacobson will combine his expertise in the modeling of atmospheric pollutants with current expertise in hydrodynamic modeling in the EFML to produce coupled atmospheric-ocean transport models. This thrust, together with that in biological fluid mechanics, has positioned the faculty in the EFML to provide leadership to the civil engineering community well into the 21st century.

The research activities of the EFML are described below. They span the range from the clouds to the seas and from rigorously fundamental to applied research. At this time there are four tenured or tenure-track faculty from civil engineering in the laboratory, with four other associated faculty from mechanical engineering, computer science, earth science and biological sciences, respectively. There are two postdoctoral scholars, 25 graduate students studying for their doctorates, and one other graduate student who use the laboratory for their research.

An Experiment to Measure the Mixing Efficiency and Fine-Scale Structure in a Breaking Internal Wave - Koseff, J.R. and Troy, C. (NSF)

The Hydrodynamics of Phytoplankton Removal in Benthic Boundary Layers by Suspension - Feeding Bivalves - Monismith, S. G. and Koseff, J. R. (NSF)

A Study of the Structure of the Near-Coastal Zone Water Column using Numerical Simulations - Koseff, J. R., Ferziger, J. H., and Monismith, S. G. (ONR)

The dynamics of turbulence and vorticity under breaking waves - Monismith, S.G. (NSF)