Present position: Director, Flow Control Lab; Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; UC San Diego.
Degrees: B.S. & M.S., Caltech; Ph.D., Stanford
Research interests: Integrating control theory and fluid mechanics to develop new strategies for optimizing, forecasting, and controlling unsteady flow systems. My lab has some unique perspectives borne out of the fusion of a number of engineering disciplines to study problems involving the drag, noise, and heat transfer triggered by flowfield unsteadiness in chaotic fluid systems.
How you describe what you do at cocktail parties: The researchers in my lab study how to eliminate or reduce harmful effects of chaos in infinite dimensional unstable systems like fluid turbulence.
Describe your work with compliant skin: We've teamed with Professor Robert Skelton of the Structural Systems and Controls Lab at UC San Diego, who specializes in the characterization and control of tensegrity structures, to investigate a compliant tensegrity fabric. This could be manufactured with a modified textile machine and stretched over aquatic vehicles to reduce noise and drag. By making this material compliant in just the right way, the energy in the near-wall vortices can be transmitted to the surface and then damped out.
What is your goal? In the short term , we aim to get a better understanding of the physics of this flow/structure interaction and its sensitivity to various possible changes to the structural parameters of the fabric. In the longer term, by optimizing the tensegrity fabric, our goal is to get levels of drag reduction that are in the double digits.
Contact Bewley atbewley@ucsd.edu. Animations of several of the results from the UCSD Flow Control Lab are available athttp://turbulence.ucsd.edu/gallery/.
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