Said E. Elghobashi

Picture of Said E. Elghobashi
Professor, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering
Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department
PH.D., Imperial College, University of London, 1974
OTH
Phone: (949) 824-6131,8451
Fax: (949) 824-3726
Email: selghoba@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
S4220 EG
Mail Code: 3975
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Chemically Reacting and Dispersed Two-Phase Flows
Academic Distinctions
Fellow of American Physical Society; Fellow of American Society of Mech. Engineers. Visiting Fellow, Cambridge University. DIC: Diploma of Imperial College. Britich Science Research Council Scholarship (1971-1974).
Research Abstract
The main objective of my research is to understand some of the fundamental properties of turbulence using the method of direct numerical simulation (DNS). DNS of turbulent flows is the numerical solution of the exact, three-dimensional, time-dependent Navier-Stokes equations. The direct solution, via DNS, of these equations, which govern the motion of Newtonian fluids, eliminates the closure problem and its inevitable empiricism.

Due to the limited memory and speed of current and near-future supercomputers (even the massively parallel machines) it is not expected that DNS will be able to predict engineering flows in complex geometries (e.g. the flow over an airplane or inside a combustor) in the foreseeable future. However, DNS will remain the only numerical method that can provide new physical insights at all scales of turbulence in flows involving complex physical phenomena such as chemically-reacting or particle-laden turbulent flows. This distinct capability of DNS is simply due to the absence of empiricism. Furthermore, DNS has already provided excellent agreement with measurements in wind tunnels at comparable values of the microscale Reynolds number. As the capabilities of parallel computing expand, DNS will be more widely used in scientific studies of complex physical phenomena in simple geometries.
Publications
Ahmed, A.M. and Elghobashi, S. E. "Direct numerical simulation of particle dispersion in homogeneous turbulent shear flows", Physics of Fluids, Vol. 13, pp.3346-3364 (2001).
Druzhinin, O.A. and Elghobashi, S. E. "Direct numerical simulation of a three-dimensional spatially-developing bubble-laden mixing layer with two-way coupling", J. Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 429, pp. 23-61 (2001).
Ahmed, A.M. and Elghobashi, S. E. "On the mechanisms of modifying the structure of turbulent homogeneous shear flows by dispersed particles", Physics of Fluids, Vol. 12, pp. 2906-2930 (2000).
Zhong, R. , Elghobashi, S. E. and Boratav, O. "Surface topology of a buoyant turbulent nonpremixed flame", Physics of Fluids, Vol. 12, pp. 2091-2100 (2000).
Elghobashi, S., Zhong, R. and Boratav, O. "Effects of gravity on turbulent nonpremixed flames", Physics of Fluids, Vol. 11, pp. 3123-3135 (1999).
Last updated
12/11/2004