This award supports cooperative work between Charles Dalton, University of Houston, and Zhuang Lixian, University of Science and Technology, Hefei, China on wake dynamics around a cylinder in oscillatory flows. This is an important problem, with potential application to understanding offshore wave loading on pile structures. This collaboration involves the strengths and innovation in computational approaches of the Chinese team, and the US PI's experience and accomplishments in prediction of unsteady wakes. Both countries will benefit from further understanding of such phenomena as boundary layer separation, vortex shedding, flow instability, wake turbulence, and wake vortex motions due to both induced-velocity and convective effects. These results may be applied to improved design of offshore structures. This award provides eighteen months of graduate student support, which will be used to enable the participation of a US student. The Chinese have obtained support from the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation.
