New opportunities for detailed flow measurements at high Reynolds numbers

High Reynolds number turbulence is ubiquitous in many flows of practical interest and its understanding is crucial to draw conclusions on the physics of turbulence. Although recent laboratory experiments, measurements in the planetary boundary layer and direct numerical simulations provide a huge amount of information, none of these data sets provide high Reynolds number, high spatial resolution and well converged statistics at the same time. As a response to this problem, an international collaboration between a group of universities and research centers started some years ago to build large scale infrastructures for high Reynolds number experiments. The Center for International Cooperation in Long Pipe Experiments, CICLoPE (www.ciclope.unibo.it) at the University of Bologna, was created for this purpose and will be open to international scientists through different collaboration programs. The first facility, which will be ready in 2010, is a large pipe flow experiment that will allow fully resolved turbulence measurements even at high Reynolds number.