Physics Colloquium: "Touching turbulence using bubbly and elastic matter""
Please note this event occurred in the past.
September 10, 2025 3:45 pm - 5:15 pm ET
HAS 124. Refreshments at 3:45. Presentation begins at 4:00.
"Touching turbulence using bubbly and elastic matter"
Varghese Mathai, Department of Physics, UMass
Abstract:
Turbulence in natural fluids is ubiquitous and has been studied for over a century. Yet it remains one of the challenging, unsolved problems in classical physics, owing to its vast hierarchy of interacting scales of fluid motion and the irregular bursts of energy dissipation that evade perfect self-similarity.
Studies of single-phase turbulence (with only one fluid) have yielded many robust results over the past decades. However, when the turbulence is multiphase, i.e. a carrier fluid + a dispersed phase, many features remain poorly understood. My talk will focus on the emerging topic of multiphase turbulence in the presence of deformable bubbles and ultrasoft membranes. We will show how the presence of deformable bubbles or soft materials can fundamentally alter turbulent flows, giving rise to emergent drag laws, steeper energy cascades, and long-term memory in systems classically thought to be memoryless. I will also share more about our ongoing searches at uncovering scale-invariant signatures in bubbly turbulence.
"Touching turbulence using bubbly and elastic matter"
Varghese Mathai, Department of Physics, UMass
Abstract:
Turbulence in natural fluids is ubiquitous and has been studied for over a century. Yet it remains one of the challenging, unsolved problems in classical physics, owing to its vast hierarchy of interacting scales of fluid motion and the irregular bursts of energy dissipation that evade perfect self-similarity.
Studies of single-phase turbulence (with only one fluid) have yielded many robust results over the past decades. However, when the turbulence is multiphase, i.e. a carrier fluid + a dispersed phase, many features remain poorly understood. My talk will focus on the emerging topic of multiphase turbulence in the presence of deformable bubbles and ultrasoft membranes. We will show how the presence of deformable bubbles or soft materials can fundamentally alter turbulent flows, giving rise to emergent drag laws, steeper energy cascades, and long-term memory in systems classically thought to be memoryless. I will also share more about our ongoing searches at uncovering scale-invariant signatures in bubbly turbulence.