Graduate students working in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The Bob and Norma Street Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory (EFML) is home to research conducted in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology (EFMH) Program.
The EFML currently has three major experimental research facilities. These include an internal wave tank, a large wave-current flume and a smaller flume. The research in these facilities reflects the EFML's interest in the interaction of fluid motion and biological systems. These are being studied on all scales, from breaking internal waves to wakes of coral heads. Flows are studied using measurement techniques including particle image velocimetry, acoustic velocimetry and laser Doppler anemometry. The flexibility of the EFML's facilities allows the study of a diverse range of complex flows.
The experimental equipment in the EFML is complemented by state-of-the-art computing facilities housed in the Peter A. McCuen Environmental Computing Center, where simulations of a wide range of flow phenomena are performed at very high resolution on hundreds of processors in parallel. The Center has a 320 AMD-core cluster within infiniband interconnect, along with several standalone rack-mounted servers for smaller jobs requiring 64 processors or less.
In addition to laboratory and computational research, over the last few years we have sustained a considerable capability for field studies, with a variety of instruments such as ADCPs (acoustic doppler current profilers), a 2m long AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle), and two fast-sampling mircrostructure profilers available for studies such as those of flows over coral reefs throughout the Pacific, internal waves and mixing in Monterey Bay, or of tracking dispersion in the San Francisco Bay Delta.
Research projects in the EFML span the range from the clouds to the seas and from rigorously fundamental to applied research. At this time there are six tenured faculty from civil and environmental engineering in the laboratory, two research associates, two postdoctoral scholars, 32 graduate students studying for their doctorates, and, at any time, visiting scholars from a variety of countries including Israel, Germany, Australia and Singapore.
