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26 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2019 nologies. I'm younger, and I play computer games—probably more than I should—and blurring the line between reality and comput- ers is a very exciting prospect. This holds true not just for its implications for video games but also its practical implications. VR provides an extremely immersive environment that al- lows people to travel and experience things they could have never imagined. AR, on the other hand, provides practical productivity boosters and quality-of-life enhancers, which make day-to-day living more bearable. Shaughnessy: What advice would you give a new designer or EE just entering this field? LaPointe: Learn, learn, learn. Technology moves fast, and as a result, the employees who work in EDA must move fast too. Designers and engineers should aim to learn more, do more, and experience more every day to better prepare themselves for the next, and inevitably large, technological advance. Shaughnessy: Thanks for speaking with me, Bryan. LaPointe: Thank you, Andy. DESIGN007 A Caltech engineer has unlocked some of the secrets behind turbulence, a much-studied but difficult-to-pin- down phenomenon that mixes fluids when they flow past a solid boundary. Beverly McKeon, the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, studies fluid mechanics. She specializes in tur- bulent flows. These types of flows are often seen in pipes and around aircraft. At the boundary where a fluid flows over a fixed struc- ture, a turbulent boundary layer is created where the flu- id interacts with the wall, creating eddies in the current. These eddies may seem to be random at first glance, but they actually create distinct patterns. These eddies have a significant impact on the fluid flow, helping to determine features such as its pressure, velocity, and density, which are important to understand when engineering an aircraft or industrial piping, for example. Like the weather, turbulence is a dynamic and ever- changing phenomenon. The shape and structure of the eddies in turbulence are geometrically self-similar, mean- ing that each of the eddies is identical, just on different scales, similar to a fractal pattern. Mathematically quantifying these repetitions, McKeon was able to formulate a dynamical model that describes turbulence using a sort of shorthand, "We knew that, un- derlying these very complicated structures, there had to be a very simple pattern. We just didn't know what that pattern was until now," says McKeon. The model could prove useful to engineers across the industry who are looking to more easily simulate turbulent systems. But more importantly, it represents fundamental research that will help scientists and engineers bet- ter understand what drives those turbulent systems. McKeon's study is titled "Self- similar hierarchies and attached eddies" and was published by Physical Review Fluids on August 26. Her work was funded by the Office of Naval Research. (Source: www.caltech.edu) Unlocking Turbulence