Paul E. Dimotakis Wins AIAA 2014 Fluid Dynamics Award
Honored for Fundamental Contributions to Turbulent Mixing and Combustion
June 17, 2014 – Reston, Va. – Paul E. Dimotakis, AIAA Fellow, and John K. Northrop Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and professor of applied physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., has won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) 2014 Fluid Dynamics Award. Dimotakis received the award at a 12:30 p.m. awards luncheon on June 17, as part of the AIAA Aviation and Aeronautics Forum and Exposition 2014, June 16–20, at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Atlanta, Ga.
"Fluid dynamics has been a key aerospace discipline from the beginning of its era, combining fundamental physics, engineering, and mathematics, as its founders appreciated. I am grateful and honored to be recognized for contributions to the field by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and my colleagues, and to be invited to join a roster with so many distinguished individuals,” said Dimotakis. “For all the remarkable progress in the field during the last century, it’s one of the few acknowledged challenges in classical physics at the beginning of the twentieth century with elements bequeathed to the twenty-first."
The AIAA Fluid Dynamics Award is presented for outstanding contributions to the understanding of the behavior of liquids and gases in motion as related to need in aeronautics and astronautics. Dimotakis is being honored for his “fundamental contributions to turbulent mixing and combustion through careful and thorough experiments using novel techniques.”
Dimotakis’ research has devised and executed experiments that have helped explained entrainment, dispersion of species, mixing, and chemical reactions in high Reynolds number flows. His work has provided reliable estimates of mixing gas-phase, liquid phase, subsonic and supersonic flows, at low and high heat release. Dimotakis also demonstrated the consequences on entrainment of large-scale organization in high Reynolds number turbulence that feeds dispersion and mixing, allowing predictions of such phenomena in some flows. Dimotakis has also made notable contributions in the areas of chaos, combustion, computational fluid dynamics, flow control, and stability in shear layers, interfaces and boundary layers. He has pioneered techniques in aero-optics, high energy chemical lasers, and many forms of diagnostic techniques.
Dimotakis is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. An avid sailor, he was a member of the sail-design team of the yacht America3, winner of the 1992 America’s Cup yacht race in San Diego, Calif.
For more information about the AIAA Fluid Dynamics Award, or the AIAA Honors and Award program, please contact Carol Stewart at carols@aiaa.org or 703.264.7623.
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