The prestigious Science magazine reports about ahighly innovative mathematical method which sheds new light into the dynamics of turbulent flows.
The method has been developed by a US-italian team, including researchers
from the Istituto Applicazioni Calcolo "Mauro Picone", National Research
Council, in Rome, Italy.
Turbulent processes play an important role in many engineering applications, for example, in the flow of air around cars or aircraft.
Even though the basic equations governing the physics of turbulent
flows are known for more than a century, their solution in actual
practice has been resisting so far even the most sophisticated analytical
and computational attempts.
In a recent paper, published by the prestigious magazine Science,
a group of USA-ITalian scientists, including Sauro Succi, from the
Istituto Applicazione Calcolo, CNR, Rome, have developed an entirely
new angle of attack to this over-resilient problem.
This new mathematical approach, known as lattice Boltzmann
method, is deeply rooted into fundamental
concepts from statistical physics (Boltzmann kinetics) to simplify the simulations. Instead of describing the fluid as a continuum
media, as in every approached developed so far, the turbulent flow field is represented as a collection of discrete 'pseudo-particles' (lattice
Boltzmann pseudo-molecules), which move and interact in a discrete lattice
according to a simplified Newtonian dynamics.
Being more fundamental from the physical point of view, the lattice
Boltzmann representation is characterized by great mathematical
elegance and ensuing computational efficiency.
Thanks to the above properties, the Lattice Boltzmann
approach allows the modeling of flows around complex geometries
to a level of accuracy far superior to the one achievable by
previous existing methods. Owing to its flexibility, the method
is likely to find applications in engineering, meteorolgy,
material and Life sciences.
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