Workshop ASTROFLU IV

Motivations and objectives

the first two local events ‘ASTROFLU’ were principally organised by the Henri Bénard PC in Lyon, 12-13/11/2008 and 15/12/2011. The third one, which took place on November 20-21, 2013, attracted an European audience and was supported by ERCOFTAC with label and sholarships.

The aim of our new ASTROFLU IV workshop is to once again gather the fluid mechanics specialists from the physics, engineering, astrophysics, and mathematics communities in order to exchange ideas and collaborate on our common interests.

The main theme of our first event was pulsating stars, because of the shared interest on highly compressible flows, theory, computation and modelling, and with particular emphasis on shock / turbulence interactions. The second theme on rotating shear flows was addressed in ASTROFLU II. There is a strong parallel between (rotating) accretion discs in the astrophysical applications, and rotating shear flows in geophysics (ocean, atmosphere), and in engineering (turbomachinery). The tools we use are often very similar, but we use multiple terminologies, and, crucially, tend to publish in separate journals. To give an example, the use of the shearing sheet approximation in astrophysics is also very similar to the pseudo-spectral DNS (Orszag / Patterson) using coordinates comoving with the mean shear (from Rogallo 1982), with now the ‘snoopy’ code from Geoffroy Lesur (Grenoble) used in the astrophysical community. There is a large scientific network of astrophysicists engaged in the study of rotating accretion disks, possibly including the effects of stratification and MHD. In the last event ASTROFLU III, a large emphasis was also given to studies in geophysics, from the Earth to rapidly rotating giant planets.

We hope that ASTROFLU IV will mark a new orientation, with:

Program

January, the 23rd

January, the 24th