Sanjiva K. Lele

Professor Lele's research group works on fluid mechanics and aerodynamics problems associated with unsteady flows, wind energy, and aeroacoustics. Recent research has focused on high-speed flows involving transition to turbulence, wake losses in wind farms, unsteady interactions between shock waves and turbulent boundary layers, unsteady separated flows, shock-induced mixing in multi-material flows, aircraft vortex wakes and condensation trails, supersonic jet noise and airframe noise, and multiphase flows and cavitation modeling. We focus on the flow physics in diverse situations to understand and model what is important for an engineering application, such as noise reduction, lower drag, higher efficiency, etc.. We also develop computational methods for multi-physics fluid flows and tools for PDE-based simulations and physics-based reduced models. Professor Lele has a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics during 1994-2004. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and won the AIAA Aeroacoustics Award in 2016.