Joseph Liu
Professor:
Engineering
Phone: +1 401 863 2654
Joseph_Liu@Brown.EDU
Professor Liu's past and present research interests, largely theoretical and computational, span a cross-section of fluids and thermal sciences: gas dynamics of two-phase flows, hypersonic viscous flows, interactions between coherent structures and fine grained turbulence in free shear flows, and aerodynamic sound generation by coherent structures. More recently he has devoted much of his effort to the role of longitudinal vortices in heat and mass transfer enhancement and in the promotion of rapid free mixing.
Interests
Professor Liu's past and present research interests, largely theoretical and computational, span a cross-section of fluids and thermal sciences: gas dynamics of two-phase flows, hypersonic viscous flows, interactions between coherent structures and fine grained turbulence in free shear flows, and aerodynamic sound generation by coherent structures. More recently he has devoted much of his effort to the role of longitudinal vortices in heat and mass transfer enhancement and in the promotion of rapid free mixing. Although directed towards fundamental understanding, these problems are technologically motivated by energy and environmental concerns. His recent couple of sabbatical leave was taken in France at the University of Nantes' Institute for Science and Engineering of Heat Transfer and Materials (ISITEM), and in Germany at the Institute for Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics, University of Stuttgart. He is a member of ASME and serves on its Committee on Heat Transfer Education, an Associate Fellow of AIAA and Fellow of APS. He is active at the Annual Meetings of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society in presentation of recent work, having organized the 37th Annual Meeting at Brown in 1984 with the active help of nineteen graduate students. He served on the international committees of the Euromech Symposium on Longitudinal Vortices, Kiev, in 1994, the International Conference on Fluid Mechanics and Propulsion, Cairo, in 1996, and the International Symposium on Flow Modeling and Turbulence Measurement, Tainan, in 1998; he was a keynote lecturer at the Symposium on Vortices and Heat Transfer, Bochum, in 1996, and a guest speaker at the Ohio Aerospace Institute's Distinguished Lecture Series on ""Boundary Layer Heat Transfer under Longitudinal Vortices"" in 1997. Professor Liu also gave recent seminars at the Laboratory for Turbomachines and Fluid Mechanics, CNRS, and University of Orsay on ""Heat Transfer under Longitudinal Vortices and its Control,"" and at the Polish Academy of Sciences' Institute for Fundamental Technological Research on ""Mixing Enhancement Properties of Persisting Nonlinear Taylor-Gortler Vortices Beyond the Trailing Edge of a Concave Wall"" at the Tenth International Couette-Taylor Workshop: Centrifulgal Flows in Science and Industry, ESPCI, Paris.
Degrees
BSE, Aero. E., 1957; BSE Mathematics, 1957; MSE, Aero. E. 1958 University of Michigan; Ph.D. Aeronautics, 1964, California Institute of technology
Awards
U.K. Science Research Council Visiting Fellow 1979/80, Dept. Mathematics, Imperial College
U.K. Science and Engineering Research Council Visiting Fellow, 1987/88, Dept. Mathematics, Imperial College
Affiliations
Fellow, American Physical Society
Associate Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Member, American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Editorial Board, Roc. R. Soc. A
Teaching
EN0171, Heat and Mass Transfer. This is a junior/senior course for undergraduate Mechanical and Chemical Engineers, although interested Civil Engineers have taken this course. It stresses fundamentals of heat conduction in a solid or motionless liquid, advective transport in internal and external flows. Similar mass transfer problems are dealt with, with fundamental derivation of the diffusion equation from individual species continuity equations. There are three laboratory sessions.
EN0170, Applied Thermodynamics. This deals primarily with gas dynamical problems associated with propulsion systems, such as the gas turbine engine.
EN282/AM242, Fluid Mechanics II. A second semester introductory course in fluid mechanics for graduate students who may or may not have encountered fluid mechanics before (except for EN281/AM241). It deals with fundamentals of fluid motion, using vorticity diffusion as an introduction to nonlinear problems in viscous flows. Boundary layer concepts, compressibility effects, linear and nonlinear hydrodynamic stability problems, compressible flows, wave motions.
Teaching assignments are quite dynamical and fluid and may not necessarily be confined to what are described here!
