• P. K. Yeung
  • Professor

Contact Information

Office: Guggenheim 361
Phone: 404.894.9341
Fax: 404.894.2760

Education

  • B.Sc(Eng.),  Mechanical Engineering, 1980, University of Hong Kong
  • M.Phil., Mechanical Engineering, 1984, University of Hong Kong
  • Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, 1989, Cornell University

Biography

Professor P.K. Yeung joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1992, after post-doctoral appointments at Queen's University at Kingston (Canada) and at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Yeung's primary interests are in the use of high-resolution direct numerical simulations to study the fundamental behavior of turbulent flows, and in collaborative efforts using the simulation data to help produce advancements in theory and modeling. Topics investigated have included basic issues in Reynolds number dependence and similarity scaling, mixing with molecular diffusivity effects over a wide range of Schmidt numbers, Lagrangian fluid particles acceleration and dispersion, and the effects of uniform solid-body rotation. These simulations are among the worlds largest, (64 billion grid points as of early 2008) and are and are conducted on machines providing tens of thousands of parallel processors at multiple national supercomputer centers supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Professor Yeung has published approximately 50 archival journal articles, which (according to the Science Citation Index) have been cited more than 1000 times in total. He leads a four-institution Petascale Applications project supported by NSF, and served as lead organizer of an NSF Cyber-Fluid Dynamics workshop held in July 2007. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Division of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Research

Fundamental studies of turbulent fluid flow using large-scale computation, with emphasis on the following areas:
  • Direct numerical simulation of turbulent flow to understand the fundamental physics of turbulent mixing and dispersion at the highest Reynolds number possible allowed by available computational power
  • Turbulence theory, experiment and modeling using numerical simulation data to enable broad interdisciplinary advances
  • Algorithm development for Petascale computing allowing the largest simulations possible on systems with tens or hundreds of thousands of
    parallel processors

Honors and Distinctions

  • First prize paper in engineering division of IBM Supercomputing Competition (1989)
  • INCITE Award, US Department of Energy Office of Science (2004)
  • Fellow of the American Physical Society (elected 2006)
  • Member of NSF TeraGrid Science Advisory Board (2008-)

Selected Publications

  • Donzis, D.A.,  Yeung, P.K. and Sreenivasan, K.R. (2008) "Energy dissipation rate and enstrophy in isotropic turbulence:          resolution effects and scaling in direct numerical simulations", Physics of Fluids, Vol. 20 (to appear).
  • Yeung, P.K., Pope, S.B. and Sawford, B.L. (2006) "Reynolds number dependence of Lagrangian statistics in large numerical simulations of isotropic turbulence." Journal of Turbulence,  Vol. 7, No. 58, 1-12.
  • Yeung, P.K. and Borgas, M.S. (2004) "Relative dispersion in isotropic turbulence: Part 1. Direct numerical simulations and Reynolds number dependence", Journal of Fluid Mechanics Vol. 503, 93-124.
  • Yeung, P.K. (2002) "Lagrangian investigations of turbulence", Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 34, 115-142.
  • Vedula, P. and Yeung, P.K. (1999) "Similarity scaling of acceleration and pressure statistics in numerical simulations of turbulence", Physics of Fluids Vol. 11, 1208-1220.