Awarded $1.6 Million To Develop A Better Description Of The Phenomenon

Engineers from the University of Michigan have been awarded a $1.6 million grant from NASA to develop a better description of turbulence, which they say could lead to more efficient airplane designs and have implications in other fields such as medicine and weather forecasting.

The Ann Arbor Journal reports that the grant is part of the Leading Edge Aeronautics Research program. Karthik Duraisamy, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at U-M, said that the need for improved turbulence models is recognized by the scientific community that deals with the phenomenon. He said he and his team, which includes collaborators from Stanford, Iowa State, Boeing, and the Silicon Valley firm Pivotal Inc. plan to take a "completely new approach."

The goal is not to provide a smoother ride through bumpy air. The team will focus on turbulence caused by the airplane moving through the air at high speeds in an effort to improve fuel efficiency. Much of the work will be done with computer modeling. He said he will take a page from the Netflix book, which predicts what a person may rent next based on an enormous database. Duraisamy says that the turbulence prediction models will be predicated in part on a database of airflow measurements and computations that will improve predictions of how a wing might perform under various conditions.

But, he said, the predictions still have to follow the laws of physics ... which is not a consideration for Netflix. The challenge, he said, is building physics into the "machine-learning approach."

FMI: http://umich.edu