Charles Meneveau

 

Charles Meneveau born in 1960 is a French-Chilean born American fluid dynamisit. He is known for his work on turbulence, specifically turbulence modeling and computational fluid dynamics. Currently, Meneveau is the Louis M. Sardella Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the associate director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) at  Johns Hopkins University. Meneveau earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 1989 at Yale Univeristy and his first postdoctoral position was at the Stanford University/NASA-Ames's Center. He has worked at John Hopkins University since 1990 in the Department of Mechanical Engineering with secondary appointments in  the Departments of Environmental Health and Engineering and Physics and Astronomy. Over the years he has accumulated a lot of awards and recognition including the Henry P. Becton Prize for Excellence in Research from Yale University in 1989 and in 2013 becoming a Fulbright Scholar. 

Currently, with Jonathan Naughton at Johns Hopkins University, Meneveau has been researching the promise and fluid dynamics challenges of wind energy. With the race to develop clean and reneweable energy, wind turbines have emerged to be a real contender and topic of research. The end goal of this research is to understand how wind interacts with turbines on large scales, because according the fellow researcher Naughton, “Wind is really an atmospheric fluid mechanics problem.” With an understanding of the physical challenges of wind turbines, researchers hope to aid in the development of inexpensive and efficient wind turbines. Specifically, Meneveau and other researchers are focusing on large scale wind turbines which have yet to be explored due to the lack of investment in wind energy. This includes studying how the blades of wind turbines, ranging from 50 to 70 meters, interact with the wind. The challenges of this research is the use of atmospheric modeling and the collection of data on groups of wind turbines to see how they interact with one another. 

References:

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-supersized-turbines-energyand-physics.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Meneveau

https://pages.jh.edu/~cmeneve1/