Center for Fluid Mechanics

Fluids@Brown

Promoting and coordinating fluid mechanics research at Brown University through the development of research collaborations, the sharing of intellectual knowledge and the coordination of graduate courses.

What is Fluid Mechanics?

The mechanics of fluids play an important role in many aspects of daily life from the dynamics of weather and climate in the atmosphere to the flow of blood in the brain, or even just how to best to get ketchup out of a bottle. It is a basic element for many research areas in engineering, geophysics, applied physics and biology.

Foundational Research

Fluid mechanics is also a rich source of fundamental research challenges in the physical or biological sciences, mathematics and scientific computation. As two of the three states of matter (solid, liquid and gas) are fluids, and it is no surprise that understanding the dynamics of fluid motion is a valuable scientific endeavor.

A Broad Scope

With the new developments in ‘soft materials’ even the distinction between liquid and solid states is sometimes vague. Fluid mechanics encompasses a wide spectrum of physical scales from the transport of suspended proteins through nano-pores to the global scales of ocean dynamics.

What We Do

Fluids@Brown (also known as the Center for Fluid Mechanics) coordinates the efforts of faculty and students at Brown collaborating in research on a wide range of topics in fluid mechanics and soft matter.  We organize seminar series and discussion groups over the entire Brown campus, including Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics and Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.  Our research activities cover the full range of theoretical, experimental and numerical approaches.