Charles Meneveau

1989: Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, Yale University, May 1989

1988: Master of Philosophy, Yale University, 1988

1987: Master of Science, Yale University, 1987

1985: B.S. in mechanical engineering, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaíso (Chile), 1985

His Ph.D. advisor was K. R. Sreenivasan and his thesis was on the multi-fractal nature of small-scale turbulence.[4] At Yale he was also informally co-advised by B. B. Mandelbrot.

Meneveau's postdoctoral position was at the Stanford University/NASA-Ames's Center.[5][6] He has been on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University since 1990. His main appointment is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering with secondary appointments in the Departments of Environmental Health and Engineering and Physics and Astronomy.

Professor Meneveau’s research is focused on understanding and modeling hydrodynamic turbulence, and complexity in fluid mechanics in general. Special emphasis is placed on the multiscale aspects of turbulence, using tools such as subgrid-scale modeling, downscaling techniques, and fractal geometry. Applications of the results to Large Eddy Simulation (LES) have facilitated applications of LES to engineering, environmental and geophysical flow phenomena. Currently Meneveau is focused on applications of LES to wind energy and wind farm fluid dynamics, on developing advanced wall models for LES, on modeling oil dispersion in the ocean, as well as on building “big-data” tools to share the very large data sets that arise in computational fluid dynamics with broad constituencies of scientists and engineers around the world

Among Meneveau’s main contributions are advances to turbulence modeling and large eddy simulations. The advances were made possible by elucidating the properties of the small-scale motions in turbulent flows and applying the new insights to the development of advanced subgrid-scale models, such as the Lagrangian dynamic model. This model has been implemented in various research and open source CFD codes (e.g. OpenFoam) and expanded the applicability of Large Eddy Simulations to complex-geometry flows of engineering and environmental interest, where prior models could not be used.

Among the application areas of Large Eddy Simulation being pursued in Meneveau’s group is the study of complex flows in large wind farms. Using the improved simulation tools as well as wind tunnel tests, Meneveau and his colleagues identified the important process of vertical entrainment of mean flow kinetic energy into an array of wind turbines. This research has clarified the mechanisms limiting wind plant performance at a time when there is enormous growth in wind farms. The research has led to new engineering models that will allow for better designed wind farms thus increasing their economic benefit and helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

Meneveau has participated in efforts to democratize access to valuable “big data” in turbulence. As a deputy director of JHU’s Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science, he worked with a team of computer scientists, applied mathematicians, astrophysicists, and fluid dynamicists that built the JHTDB (Johns Hopkins Turbulence Databases). This open numerical laboratory provides researchers from around the world with user-friendly access to large data sets arising from Direct Numerical Simulations of various types of turbulent flows. To date, hundreds of researchers worldwide have used the data, and flow data at over hundred trillion points have been sampled from the database. The system has demonstrated how “big data” resulting from large world-class numerical simulations can be shared with many researchers who lack the massive supercomputing resources needed to generate such data.

Meneveau also has performed groundbreaking research on understanding several multiscale aspects of turbulence. As part of his doctoral work at Yale in the late 1980s, Meneveau and his advisor Prof. K. R. Sreenivasan established the fractal and multifractal theory for turbulent flows and confirmed the theory using experiments. Interfaces in turbulence were shown to have a fractal dimension of nearly 7/3, where the 1/3 exponent above the value of two valid for smooth surfaces could be related to the classic Kolmogorov theory. And a universal multi-fractal spectrum was established, leading to a simple cascade model, which has since been applied to many other physical, biological and socio-economic systems. Later, as a postdoc at Stanford University’s Center for Turbulence Research under the guidance of Prof. P. Moin, Meneveau pioneered the application of orthogonal wavelet analysis to turbulence, introducing the concept of wavelet spectrum and other scale-dependent statistical measures of variability.

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