ERCOFTAC workshop on Environmental Fluid Mechanics: Turbulence and Fluid Mixing took place on the 23rd - 24th of May 2022 at the Laboratoire de Mécanique des Fluides de Lille, Université de Lille, France.

It was particularly special event as it was dedicated to Jose Manuel Redondo who passed away in 2020.

One of the organiser’s Andrew Nowakowski told us: 

"The workshop was focused on the potential applications of emerging fractal approaches and other field reconstruction methods to environmental fluid mechanics. The meeting was dedicated to Jose Manuel Redondo who passed away in 2020. He was involved in many ERCOFTAC SIG activities and therefore his friends and colleagues came not only to present interesting interdisciplinary topics related to turbulence and vortex formation but also to share nice memories of him as a friend and collaborator."

Motivation:

Jose Manuel Redondo was involved in many ERCOFTAC SIG activities. Apart from running his own SIG14 he attended nearly all SIG42 workshops and was acting as an editor in numerous ERCOFTAC book and bulletin contributions. Turbulence was his main field of interest and he inspired new developments of synthetic models. Synthetic models are widely used in various domains, including Lagrangian aspects in turbulence mixing/stirring, particle dispersion/clustering (KS). Flow realisations with complete spatial, and sometime spatio-temporal, dependency, are generated via superposition of random modes (mostly spatial, and sometime spatial and temporal, Fourier modes), with prescribed constraints such as: strict incompressibility (divergence-free velocity field at each point), high Reynolds energy spectrum. Recent improvements consisted in incorporating optimisation methods used in mathematics to generate synthetic fields.

A further goal of this conference was to bring people from different disciplines together. In particular, recent emerging fractal approaches and field reconstruction methods have the potential to provide the framework for the construction of new synthetic turbulent flows. This workshop was also focus on potential application to such techniques to environmental fluid mechanics. Interdisciplinary contributors especially contributed to:

A non-exhaustive list of related topics that overlaps with Jose interests can be proposed as follows:

Coordinator: Dr Andrzej F. Nowakowski
Co-organisers: Professor J. Christos Vassilicos, Dr Franck Nicolleau