- Harry Swinney
Harry L Swinney (born
1939 ) is an Americanphysicist noted for his contributions to the field ofnonlinear dynamics .Biography
Swinney graduated from
Rhodes College in1961 with a Bachelor degree and obtained his Ph.D. fromJohns Hopkins University in1968 .He came to the University of Texas at Austin in
1978 and eventually headed the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics.He is currently the director of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the
University of Texas at Austin .Work
Swinney was among one of the pioneers in
chaos theory , most notably for the experiments he did withJerry Gollub on the onset ofturbulence for water in rotating cylinders ("Couette-Taylor " flow). ["", New York: Penguin, byJames Gleick ] His general research interest have concerned instabilities,chaos ,pattern formation , and turbulence in systems driven away from equilibrium by the imposition of gradients intemperature ,velocity ,concentration , etc.His past research concerned:
* chaos and pattern formation in flow between concentric rotating cylinders (the "Couette-Taylor " system)
* chaos andstrange attractor s in oscillatingchemical reactions
* a laboratory model ofJupiter 'sGreat Red Spot
* a laboratory model of the atmospheric "blocking" phenomenon
* turbulence in buoyancy drivenconvection ; pattern formation in surface-tension-driven (" Marangoni") convection
* growth of metallicfractal clusters inelectrodeposition
* chemical patterns of the type predicted byAlan Turing in his 1952 paper "The Chemical Basis forMorphogenesis "
* other patterns in chemical reaction-diffusion systems, including reactions that are periodically forced in time, where "Arnold tongue " typephase diagrams have been found
* vertically oscillated containers of grains (sand, metallic particles, etc.), which exhibit square, stripe, hexagon, spiral, andoscillon (localized) patterns.His current research topics include:
*shock waves in supersonic sand
* the determination of statistical properties of rapidgranular flows, where the observations are compared to the predictions ofkinetic theory andcontinuum theory
* instabilities influidized bed s, where a fluid flows upward through a granular bed, such as in a gasoline refinery catalytic cracker
*viscous fingering patterns at the interface betweenimmiscible fluid s
* buckling of thin sheets (plastic, leaves of plants)
* scaling and transport in rapidly rotatingturbulent flow s, such as those inocean s andatmosphere s.References
External links
* [http://chaos.utexas.edu/swinney.html Homepage of Prof Swinney at the University of Texas at Austin]
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