The UK Fluids Network’s Special Interest Group (SIG) on Flow Instability and Control has held its first online meeting since the lockdown.

Focusing on the topic ‘Data Assimilation in Fluid Mechanics’, the meeting was organised by Department of Aeronautics academics Dr George Papadakis (who is leader of the SIG) and Dr Georgios Rigas, as well as Davide Lasagna (University of Southampton) and Xuerui Mao (University of Nottingham). 

The SIG specialises in fluid flow transition and control: hydrodynamic stability, coherent structures and nonlinear dynamics, modelling, simulation, experiments and development of novel flow control strategies. 

"Our online meeting has helped us to continue our momentum, disseminate our most recent, exciting work, and to receive feedback and learn from other colleagues.”  Dr Georgios Rigas Department of Aeronautics Lecturer

Its aims include facilitating communication and collaboration for emerging challenges, training the next generation of researchers, and increasing international visibility of the UK’s research activities in this area. The SIG members consist of leading figures in established areas (like flow instability) and emerging areas (dynamical systems, flow control, optimisation). Members hail from both academia and industry (including Airbus, Rolls-Royce & McLaren), and their expertise covers theory, computation and experiments.   

Dr Rigas explains that “The online meeting is a great opportunity for expanding the network to include more participants and speakers from other countries that otherwise may not have attended in person.” 

“While many other meetings and conferences in this field have been cancelled or postponed, our online meeting has helped us to continue our momentum, disseminate our most recent, exciting work, and to receive feedback and learn from other colleagues.” 

Among the meeting’s talks was a session from the Department’s Dr Yongyun Hwang (with Bruno Eckhardt) on ‘An optimisation-based quasi-linear approximation for linearly stable shear flows’. 

All talks are now available on the SIG for Flow Instability and Control’s YouTube channel.