Bryan Schmidt
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Engineering
Air and water flowing over a moving ship or airplane usually becomes turbulent, a chaotic churning that adds friction and wastes fuel. Fires create a different kind of messy flow: swirling vortices, streaks and whirls that make wildfires hard to predict and control.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
- Topics
fluid dynamics
laminar flow control
drag reduction
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Design lattices of phononic subsurfaces, engineered material units placed under a surface, and use stability theory and direct numerical simulations to test whether they suppress turbulence-causing disturbances downstream and from varying directions.
- Develop a coiled phononic subsurface architecture that damps flow instabilities over a much broader frequency range than the standard uncoiled design.
- Experimentally validate phononic subsurfaces in a water tunnel, using phase-locked and time-resolved particle image velocimetry (laser-based flow imaging) to measure how well they keep flow laminar.
- Develop a one-step background-oriented schlieren tomography method, which reconstructs 3D gas density from distorted camera views, using a wavelet basis and a physics-informed closure built from combustion and fluid equations.
- Produce 4D reconstructions of laboratory-scale wildfire surrogates and compare them with simulations of the same fires to understand how air entrainment interacts with vortex structure.
More about the research
Both projects ask how such complex flows can be measured, understood and, where possible, tamed.
Why it matters
Passive laminar flow control could reduce drag on ships and aircraft, lowering fuel use, costs and emissions, without the energy demands of active devices. Better 4D measurements of fire dynamics could improve wildfire prediction models. That would help communities and agencies anticipate fire behavior as climate change makes wildfires more common and destructive.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Vinicius Maron Sauer
California State University-Northridge, CA·Engineering
Design new non-premixed counterflow burners using quadric surfaces and their combinations to create unevenly curved flames like those in practical combustion systems.
Rajat Mittal
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Engineering
Extend the Force Partitioning Method, which splits drag into vortex, viscous and shear contributions, to turbulent flow over smooth, transitionally rough, fully rough and patchy walls using direct numerical simulations.
Olivier Coutier-Delgosha
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Engineering
Measure how the repeated growth and collapse of cavitation bubbles weakens and ruptures the surfactant film around water droplets in oil, using high-speed visualization of ultrasound-driven emulsions.
The school
Case Western Reserve University: 34 labs on PI Pages, $643M a year on research, 213 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.