Department Seminar: Jim Wallace

Professor Emeritus, Director, Burgers Program for Fluid Dynamics, University of Maryland, Department of Mechanical Engineering

All dates for this event occur in the past.

207 Koffolt Lab
140 W 19th Ave
Columbus, OH 43210
United States

Jim Wallace

Professor Emeritus, Director, Burgers Program for Fluid Dynamics, University of Maryland, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Highlights of Fifty Years of Turbulent Boundary Layer Research

Just over fifty years ago, in September 1961, the first international Colloquium on Turbulence was held in Marseille, France.  It was organized by Alexandre Favre for the inauguration of the ’Institut de Mécanique Statistique de la Turbulence’. Participants at the colloquium were outstanding luminaries of the subject: Kolmogorov, Yaglom, von Karman, G.I. Taylor, Liepmann, Laufer, Corrisin, Batchelor, Kovasznay, Kraichnan, Townsend and many others. Key problems were identified and presented during review lectures given by a few invited speakers, followed by extended open discussions. This Colloquium has led to the development of research areas that are still very much alive today.

The Turbulence Colloquium Marseille  2011, held in September of last year, was organized with the same format and adopted a similar long-range perspective. Its goal was to assess the achievements of the last 50 years of turbulence research and to identify future challenges that still remain. There were seven sessions, each devoted to a generic type of turbulent flow. Prof.  Wallace gave the lecture on turbulent boundary layers and will repeat this lecture in this seminar series.

Bio

 Jim Wallace is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park.  He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in 1962 and 1964 at the Georgia Institute of Technology and his D. Phil. in Engineering Science at Oxford University in 1969.  He was a research scientist at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Stroemungsforschung in Goettingen, Germany  from 1969 until he joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1975.  In addition to his research and teaching, Wallace has held several academic administrative positions at Maryland.  From 1985 - 87 he was the Assistant Provost of the Division of Mathematics, Physical Science and Engineering.  From 1993 - 1998 he served as Associate Chairman for Graduate Studies in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He also founded, and has directed since 1998, several Science, Technology and Society programs at Maryland. 

Wallace does experimental research on turbulent shear flows, in particular with the development of techniques for measuring and analysing velocity gradient fields.  He is currently investigating scalar dispersion in shear flows with environmental and mixing applications as well as turbulence in high temperature flows and is involved in a renewed effort to understand the structure and transport processes within bounded turbulent shear flows.

He became a American Physical Society (APS) Fellow in 1989 and was chair of its Division of Fluid Dynamics in 2003.  He is currently the DFD councilor representative on the APS Council.  Other recognitions of his research and teaching include: Distinguished Service Award in the Engineering Sciences of the Washington Academy of Sciences (1984), Distinguished Scholar-Teacher of the University of Maryland, College Park (1987), Achievement Award for Contribution to Science of the Sigma Xi Chapter of the University of Maryland (1992), induction in the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni of the Georgia Institute of Technology (1995), the University System of Maryland Regents Teaching Award (2004), The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education award as  U.S. Professor of the Year for Maryland (2005), and the Kirwan Undergraduate Education Award of the University of Maryland (2006).

Category: Seminar