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Research

A brief overview of active research efforts, experimental facilities, and publicly-available software tools can be found below.  Feel free to contact Dr. Luhar for further information.

Research Projects

Codes and Tutorials

Please see the following GitHub repositories for public-available MATLAB codes on:

  • Resolvent Analysis: Developed together with Dr. Beverley McKeon at Caltech and Dr. Ati Sharma at University of Southampton. This particular code is in primitive variables. In addition to the standard no-slip boundary condition, it can also handle simplified conditions corresponding to active and passive control (e.g., opposition control and compliant walls). Dr. Luhar also provided a tutorial on resolvent analysis at the AIAA Aviation meeting in 2016, as part of an invited session on modal analysis methods.
  • Dynamic Blade: Developed as part Dr. Luhar’s Ph.D. thesis working with Dr. Heidi Nepf. This is a simple finite difference code to simulate the dynamics of inextensible, elastic blades (or beams) under oscillatory flow.

Facilities

All large-scale experiments take place in the Blue Water Channel at USC (see photos below).  This is a free-surface facility with a test section of length 7.6 m, width 0.9 m, and depth 0.6 m.  Flows with free-stream velocities up to 0.6 m/s can be generated in this facility with turbulence levels below 1%.  In addition, we have several bench-top experiments that are housed in a separate lab space.

Current instrumentation includes:

  • 2D LDV with a 500 mm standoff distance mounted on a precision traverse (MSE miniLDV).
  • Submersible fiber-film hot wire boundary layer probes (Dantec miniCTA).
  • 2D-2C PIV system consisting of a 5 W CW laser and a 1 MP high-speed camera (Phantom VEO 410-L) capable of generating velocity measurements at 5200 Hz.
  • 2D-2C PIV system comprising a double-pulsed Nd:YAG laser (Litron Nano-L PIV; 50 mJ/pulse) and a 4 MP CMOS camera (Dalsa Falcon2) capable of generating velocity measurements at 50 Hz.
  • Several FDM 3D printers (Prusa I3) and two SLA 3D printers (formlabs Form2 and Form3).
University of Southern California