Two lovely, and quite distinct papers were published recently,  The first –  with our former PhD student Jorn Cheney, and Jeremy Rehm, is on the way bats use the muscles in their wings to control wing camber during flight. This paper appeared a couple of weeks ago in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The paper received a special “Inside JEB” article

 

The second paper,  with our present and former lab members: Howon Lee, Nick Simone, Yuanhang Zhu, Yunxing Su, Bernardo Ribeiros, and Jen Franck – appeared this week in Physical Review Fluids, and is on the trajectory of vortices shed behind an energy harvesting hydrofoil and combines experiments, theory and our first foray into Machine Learning.  Its worth noting that Howon and Nick performed this research as undergraduates in the lab

Congratulations to both research collaborations!!

Congrats to Yuanhang who successfully defended his PhD dissertation this morning.  Yuanhang will be cleaning up a few loose ends before moving to the University of Virginia to start a Post Doc with Dan Quinn.

Congratulations to our former lab members: Varghese, Gali and Asimanshu.  Our paper on the improved performance of membrane hydrofoils for energy harvesting appeared in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics this week

 

Congratulations to the seniors who have worked in the lab and who are graduating this weekend: Alex Koh-Bell, Ian Brown, Jay-Young Cho, Erin Tucker and Ilan Upfal.

 

 

 

 

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Congratulations to Alex Koh-Bell and Ilan Upfal, both of whom were awarded a Halpin fellowship for their senior capstone projects in our lab.  Alex is working on improving wind turbine performance using an “adaptive Gurney flap”, while Ilan is using membrane airfoils to improve the performance of an oscillating foil turbine to extract energy from tidal streams.

Congrats to both of you

Aerosol transmission from driver to passengerCongratulations to lab alumni Varghese Mathai and Asimanshu Das on our Physics of Fluids paper on airflow patterns inside passenger cars, and the implications for airborne disease transmission.  This is a followup to our earlier Science Advances paper (last year), and clarifies a number of remaining questions.

 

A warm welcome to two new members of the lab:  Xiaowei He is joining as Postdoc after completing his PhD with Dave Williams at IIT.  Cameron Urban is joining as a visiting scientist, after completing his BSc from Washington University of St Louis.

Take that Omicron! – Yuanhang and Siyang at the AIAA SciTech in San Diego.   They both presented papers  – on aeroelastic instabilities, and on Gurney flap aerodynamics.

It was great to be back at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting – in person – in Phoenix.  Brown was represented by a wonderful group, including this crew from our lab!

Congratulations to Yuanhang Zhu and Xiaozhou Fan – they were each awarded the Sy Ostrach Graduate Fellowship for the 2021-22 academic year. This fellowship, honors students in Fluids and Thermal Science who have achieved distinction in the PhD research.