Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

By designing new approaches for the analysis of fluid-image sequences the fluminance group aims at contributing to several application domains of great interest for the community and in which the analysis of complex fluid flows plays a central role. The group focuses mainly on two broad application domains:

• Environmental sciences;

• Experimental fluid mechanics and industrial flows.

Environmental sciences

The first huge application domain concerns all the sciences that aim at observing the biosphere evolution such as meteorology, climatology or oceanography but also remote sensing study for the monitoring of meteorological events or human activities consequences. For all these domains image analysis is a practical and unique tool to observe, detect, measure, characterize or analyze the evolution of physical parameters over a large domain. The design of generic image processing technique for all these domains might offer practical software tools to measure precisely the evolution of fluid flows for weather forecasting or climatology studies. It might also offer possibilities of closed surveillance of human and natural activities in sensible areas such as forests, river edges, and valley in order to monitor pollution, floods or fire. The need in terms of local weather forecasting, risk prevention, or local climate change is becoming crucial for our tomorrow's life. At a more local scale, image sensors may also be of major utility to analyze precisely the effect of air curtains for safe packaging in agro-industrial.

Experimental fluid mechanics and industrial flows

In the domain of experimental fluid mechanics, the visualization of fluid flows plays a major role, especially for turbulence study since high frequency imaging has been made currently available. Together with analysis of turbulence at different scales, one of the major goals pursued at the moment by lot of scientists and engineers consists in studying the ability to manipulate a flow to induce a desired change. This is of huge technological importance to enhance or inhibit mixing in shear flows, improve energetic efficiency or control the physical effects of strain and stresses. This is for instance of particular interest for:

• military applications, for example to limit the infra-red signatures of fighter aircraft;

• aeronautics and transportation, to limit fuel consumption by controlling drag and lift effects of turbulence and boundary layer behavior;

• industrial applications, for example to monitor flowing, melting, mixing or swelling of processed materials, or preserve manufactured products from contamination by airborne pollutants, or in industrial chemistry to increase chemical reactions by acting on turbulence phenomena.

.