Daniel Lecoanet
Northwestern University
Seminar Information
~ Meeting ID: 993 3543 5896
~ Seminar Recording Available: Please contact seminar coordinator, Jake Blair at (j1blair@eng.ucsd.edu)
In nature, turbulent convective fluids are often found adjacent to stably stratified fluids. These stably stratified regions admit internal gravity waves, which can be excited by convection. This process occurs in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans, as well as in stars and in other planets. The dynamical effects of these waves depend on the efficiency of the excitation process. I will describe a series of numerical simulations which help explain how internal waves are generated by convection. The simulations are run using Dedalus, an open-source pseudo-spectral code that can solve nearly arbitrary PDEs in a range of geometries. These simulations show good agreement with heuristic theories of wave generation by convection.
Daniel Lecoanet studies astrophysical and geophysical fluid dynamics, primarily using numerical simulations. He is a core developer of the Dedalus pseudo-spectral code, which can solve nearly arbitrary equations which the user specifies in plain text. Daniel received his undergraduate degree at University of Wisconsin—Madison, a masters degree at University of Cambridge, his PhD at University of California—Berkeley under Eliot Quataert, and was a Princeton Center for Theoretical Science and Lyman Spitzer Jr. postdoctoral fellow at Princeton before joining Northwestern University in 2020.