Biography

After completing my undergraduate education in Grenoble, I graduated as an engineer from the Ecole Supérieure d Hydraulique in Grenoble. I then prepared a Ph D at the Institut de Mécanique de Grenoble under E.J. Hopfinger's supervision. The subject dealt with statistical properties of small scale turbulence and deviations from the theoretical predictions of Kolmogorov (1941). The experiments I conducted were rather successful since reliable estimates were obtained for velocity structure functions up to order 12. In 1984, I was a post-doc fellow at the University of Newcastle with R.A. Antonia where I addressed other aspects of small scale turbulence, e.g. the departure from isotropy of various turbulent flows. In 1986, I started working as a CNRS Chargé de Recherche at the Institut de Mécanique Statistique de la Turbulence (IMST - now IRPHE) in Marseille. In 1995, I visited Japan and investigated on possibilities to develop collaborations between IRPHE and Japanase Universities or Industrial Research Insitutes (the detailed report in French is available here).

In the last 15 years, I have conducted at IRPHE (formerly IMST) experimental investigations of various turbulent flows :

• Turbulent boundary layers with various wall conditions (riblets, suction, ...) have been widely studied with L. Fulachier (with a strong collaboration from J. Cousteix's group at ONERA-CERT and from R.A. Antonia's at the University of Newcastle). We were mainly interested in studying the detailed structure of such natural and manipulated flows, in terms of basic turbulence properties as well as through the contibutions of organized coherent structures such as ejections or sweeps to the turbulent transport of momentum.
• Experimental and numerical investigations of variable density turbulent jets (mixing of air, helium or CO2 with the ambient air) have been developed with M. Amielh and L. Fulachier, in collaboration with M. Abid and R. Schiestel (IRPHE) and J. Dusek (Univ. of Strasbourg). These flows are of fundamental interest but they are also associated with various applications. The influence of density variations is examined in great detail from two-component laser Doppler velocimetry and PIV measurements. The near-field region and the interface region are more specifically investigated. Note that the instabilities appearing in an axisymmetric air jet at very low Reynolds numbers were also studied through DNS by I. Danaila. Instabilities appearing in variable density plane jets have been studied, more recently, by S. Ravier.
• Finally, my recent contribution to the understanding of small scale properties has concerned, on the one hand, the experimental investigation of joint statistics between temperature and its dissipation and, on the other hand, the development and the detailed analysis of the evolution equation for the probability density function of temperature increments (with L. Danaila and P. Le Gal from IRPHE, J.F. Pinton from ENS Lyon, A. Pumir from INL Nice, J. Dusek from the Univ. of Strasbourg and S. Vaienti from the Univ. of Toulon). A similar procedure was also applied with R.A. Antonia (Univ. of Newcastle) to study pressure statistics and the second- and fourth-order moments of velocity increments.