The University of Utah Department of Mechanical Engineering is pleased to announce that associate professor Eric Pardyjak received the department 2011 Researcher of the Year Award.  This well deserved award is based on Faculty Activity Report scholarship, as well as proposal and grant data.  Dr. Pardyjak’s research interests are in the areas of fluid mechanics, atmospheric turbulence, urban fluid mechanics, and stratified turbulence.

Current Research Projects

The GEnUSiS (Green Environmental Urban Simulations for Sustainability) Project:

This collaborative multidisciplinary NSF funded project builds on previous NSF and DOE projects. The project, titled “Understanding the impact of Green Infrastructure on urban microclimate and energy use aims to develop tools to better understand urban transport physics using state of the art simulation technologies including massively parallel urban Large-Eddy Simulations, radiation and mass transport using parallel computation techniques on the GPU, as well as state of the art optimization techniques. The project is also attempting to link small-scale building resolving models with mesoscale weather models for improved prediction capability. More generally, this project addresses the critical need to improve our understanding of how Green Infrastructure (and more generally land-use and land cover change) interacts with the urban environment at the local street level scale, neighborhood scale, city scale, and mesoscales to determine the distribution of heat, moisture and pollutants.

The MATERHORN Project:

This ONR (Office of Naval Research) funded MURI (Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative) project led by the University of Notre Dame builds on our research group’s work related to flow in complex terrain and during transition periods. It is designed to better understand flow and turbulence process in mountainous terrain for improved mesoscale modeling. The project aims to understand turbulent transport process in the surface layer on different types of terrain subject to different levels of synoptic forcing. As part of the project, a series of large field campaigns will be conducted at the Dugway Proving Grounds.

The Windbreak Design Project:

This SERDP (Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program) funded project has a focus of developing improved transport and deposition models. We have conducted deposition experiments in the wind-tunnel investigating the effects of turbulence on enhanced deposition to vegetative elements. The results are being used to develop generalized deposition parameterizations for use in Lagrangian transport models. The project also includes validation field experiments.

Visit the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory web site for more information.