The UK Turbulence Consortium

The UK Turbulence Consortium (UKTC) brings together complementary expertise and co-ordinates activities to look at coherent, rational and strategic ways of understanding, predicting and controlling turbulent flows using High Performance Computing. The consortium is crucial for the UK in order to augment and unify the research efforts of its participants and to communicate its findings to a wider audience. Firstly funded in 1995, the UKTC has been through six highly successful iterations. It has seen significant growth since its inception, from 5 original members to more than 80 members and 200 students over 30 UK institutions. In the last 4 decades, the UKTC has (i) demonstrated its ability to convert access to national High-End Computing (HEC) resources into internationally-leading research (hundreds published papers since 1995 with thousands of non-self-citations), (ii) established its international competitiveness, (iii) helped its members to leverage and secure substantial funding from governmental bodies and industry, (iv) allowed the discovery of new fluid flow phenomena, leading to new ways of improving the beneficial effects and reducing the negative effects of turbulent flows, and (v) facilitated the design of more sophisticated turbulence models redefining industry standards.