The project will partially cover travel expenses of invited speakers and student participants and organizing expenses related to the workshop entitled "The Center for Turbulence Research Summer Program," to be held at Stanford University. A competitive process is used to select the participants, based on the merits of their research proposals and their research credentials. Partial funding will support the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth biennial CTR Summer Programs. The 2020 Program is tentatively scheduled to be held at Stanford from July 19 to August 14, 2020. The other government agencies that support the CTR Summer Programs are ONR, AFOSR, NASA, and DOE. For 2020 we plan to limit the number of participants to no more than 60. In every edition, the CTR Summer Programs have typically engaged up to 70 participants from outside of Stanford, who join about 30 Stanford participants for a one-month period of intense research on projects related to turbulent flow physics and modeling. Stanford participants include faculty, graduate students, and a cadre of 10-20 CTR postdocs that participate assisting full-time the visitors in order to warrant successful outcomes in every research project. In 2018 Summer Program, CTR hosted 74 participants from 8 countries, including 26 U.S. institutions. Thirty-eight CTR staff members, worked alongside the participants and contributed to 36 research projects spearheaded during the Summer Program. The participants included experimentalists, theoreticians, and computational scientists. A competitive process is used to select the participants. They are selected based on their research credentials, the merits of their research proposals and the relevance to areas of interest to CTR. Graduate students are accepted to accompany their research advisors. Financial support in the form of stipends is provided to the participants.
One of the main goals of the workshop is to frame the challenges in turbulence modeling for the next few years. The findings of the program will be collected and published as a comprehensive technical report. It is expected that the report will consist of forty to fifty technical papers (about 500 pages) which will be delivered to NSF and to other sponsors of the program, in addition to worldwide dissemination at the end of the calendar year. The report, like the reports from the prior workshops, will be available on the worldwide web (www.stanford.edu/group/ctr/). Many of the papers in the report will be eventually published in high quality technical journals. The bulk of the CTR Summer Programs involves hands-on interrogation of numerical simulation databases for testing models and hypotheses proposed by the participants. Additional calculations to generate new databases may be performed during the summer. The participants are divided into focus groups based on their proposed areas of research. In the 2018 Summer Program, the focus groups consisted of Multi-phase Flows, Numerical Methods, Multi-physics and Data-driven Studies, Wall Turbulence, and Combustion.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
