A life of Turbulence Rewarded

The University of Newcastle's Professor Robert Antonia, from the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, is considered a leading authority on turbulence.

To recognise his contribution, Professor Antonia has been given a Citation Laureate by the United States Publishers Thomson ISI at the National press club in Canberra.

"It means out there in the scientific community, fellow researchers believe the work my colleagues and I have been doing may be worthwhile," said Professor Antonia.

His laboratories are filled with wind and water tunnels, and various types of jet rigs, all specially designed to provide a better understanding of turbulence and different strategies for managing it.

"In the atmosphere turbulence is the natural state," says Professor Antonia, "it is essential for maintaining life and dispersing pollution.

"Turbulence can also be exploited for improving the speed of aircraft, ships and motor vechiles. Even competitive swimmers use turbulence to assist them. I understand that the new swimsuit models for the Athens Olympic games will have better turbulence management than earlier models, combining the use of turbulence generating bumps and riblets similar to those found on shark skin.

"Several of our current projects use suction to control turbulence as air flows over a surface that of an aircraft wing for example. The experiments show that drag can be reduced either by eradicating the turbulence near the surface or delaying the location at which the turbulent flow separates from the surface. In either case, the outcome is a reduction in drag with obvious implication for reducing costs. However, we would have to be sure the energy needed to create the suction is less than the energy saved by the process, to make it a viable option for commercial aviation.

"We have also found that we can manipulate the turbulence as it emerges from jet nozzles by applying various types of perturbations at the nozzle exit. This can lead to either a reduction in jet noise or improved mixing, a characteristic beneficial to a number of combustion processes.

"Using a combination of experiment and computations, research on roughness elements placed on a surface has identified the optimum spacing which maximises heat transfer; this should lead to an improvement in the efficiency of heat exchangers.

"All of this work has wide ranging implications with regard to cost and energy savings and pollution control," said Professor Antonia.

Professor Antonia is listed as one of the world's most influential engineering authors by the Institute of Scientific Information.

Item provided courtesy of The University of Newcastle