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Turbulent topography
Melissa A. Green (graduate alumna '09)
Syracuse University, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
The turbulent motion of fluids is chaotic by nature, populated by spinning vortices that cause powerful natural phenomena such as whirlpools and tornadoes. When this turbulence occurs in fluids in a channel, the interactions between these vortices form distinct structures, allowing researchers the opportunity to organize and categorize the chaos of turbulent fluid movement. A representation of these structures that comes from a two-dimensional analysis is presented in the top image, while a representation using the full three-dimensional data is presented below.