PhD on Lagrangian analysis of rotating turbulent convection

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label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Catan Andreea Corina
Turbulent flow is omnipresent in nature and technology. In contrast to a decade-old paradigm, even highly turbulent flow can be strongly influenced and determined by the boundaries. There is increasing evidence that there are different states of turbulent flow, with sharp transitions and bifurcations in between them.

These observations make it very difficult to extrapolate the results from lab-scale experiments to industrial, geophysical and even astrophysical flows. We want to examine experimentally, numerically and theoretically whether there are indeed different states of turbulence, how they are triggered, and what the nature of the transitions between them is. We focus on turbulence in closed systems with relevance for geophysical and industrial applications, namely on rotating Rayleigh–Bnard turbulence.

Job description



This PhD-project involves a fundamental study of different states in rotating turbulent convection and the transitions between them by laboratory experiments. You will focus on exploring with 3D Particle Tracking Velocimetry (3D-PTV) how the Lagrangian dynamics of (fluid) particles can be utilized for turbulent state characterization, how the flow transition from one state to the other in rotating convection will affect the Lagrangian statistics of (fluid) particles, how the boundary-layer dynamics and its interaction with the bulk changes with increasing rotation rate, and how particle and thermal inertia affect Lagrangian particle dynamics in (rotating) convection.

The key objective is whether we can characterize the turbulent state from a Lagrangian point-of-view. Much of the experimental infrastructure is already present, which gives your research project a flying start. It is expected that you strongly collaborate with another PhD-project addressing several of these issues with high-resolution numerical simulations.

Location

The work will be carried out at the Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (www.fluid.tue.nl) at the Department of Applied Physics of Eindhoven University of Technology. The project is supervised by Dr.ir. R.P.J. Kunnen and Profs. H.J.H. Clercx and F. Toschi.