Auburn University researchers join $30 million NSF turbulence center

Auburn University researchers are joining a new, $30 million National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center that will bring together physicists, mathematicians, engineers and AI researchers from across the country to develop new ways of understanding and predicting turbulent systems.

Turbulence is everywhere — in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the storms moving across the atmosphere and the plasmas inside fusion energy devices. It plays an essential role in how pollutants and heat spread through the ocean and atmosphere, how fluids move through chemical processing plants, and how plasmas behave in extreme environments from lab to space.

The NSF Center for Transformative Explorations in Multi-Physics and Engineering of Scientific Turbulence (TEMPEST) award supports students and researchers at Michigan State University, Auburn University, Baylor University, Georgia Institute of Technology, San José State University, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, University of Rochester and Yale University to combine theory, computation, AI techniques and experimentation to build trustworthy predictive models of real-world turbulence for high consequence applications. Additional partners include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Fusion and General Atomics.

By combining theory, computation, experimentation and artificial intelligence, TEMPEST researchers will test new ideas against observations and refine predictive models across very different turbulent systems.

Auburn will lead the investigation of a particularly challenging regime in which particles in a fluid interact strongly with one another over long distances.

“Most people encounter turbulence in familiar forms, such as water flowing in a river or air moving around an airplane,” said Saikat Chakraborty Thakur, Auburn associate professor in Auburn's Department of Physics and TEMPEST co-investigator. “We study turbulence in complex plasmas, where particles can interact over much longer distances, and the system can retain a memory of what happened before. That makes the turbulence fascinating and much harder to predict.”

Auburn researchers will study these effects using complex, or dusty, plasma, in which tiny solid particles become highly electrically charged and organize into a fluid-like system. The team will build a new dusty-plasma turbulence experiment to examine how the strength and range of particle interactions affect the movement of energy once turbulence develops.

“The beauty of dusty plasma experiments is that they can be built and run by students,” Thakur said. “Our students can see firsthand how an experiment is designed, how an instrument is built and how observations can lead to a scientific discovery. It gives them an opportunity to experience the entire process of doing science and engineering.”

The Auburn research has implications beyond the laboratory. Strong interactions and memory effects occur in astrophysical plasmas, influence how energy moves through fusion-energy devices and affect plasma environments around spacecraft during atmospheric entry. Connecting Auburn’s experimental and theoretical expertise with the broader TEMPEST team will help researchers develop models that can be applied across those different systems.

“The strength of TEMPEST is that no single university has to solve this problem alone,” said Evdokiya (Eva) Kostadinova, Auburn associate professor and the university’s principal investigator for the center. “By integrating Auburn’s experimental and theoretical research with the expertise of our partners, we can multiply the impact of what each team can accomplish on its own.”

TEMPEST will also create opportunities for students and early-career researchers to work across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The center plans to make its data and software broadly available, engage the public through museum exhibitions and immersive media, reach more than 10,000 K-12 students annually through educational programs and help train an AI-fluent scientific workforce prepared to tackle complex problems across disciplines.

About TEMPEST

The Center for Transformative Explorations in Multi-Physics and Engineering of Scientific Turbulence (TEMPEST) is a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center led by Michigan State University. The $30 million award brings together researchers from eight universities, three national laboratories and three industry partners to develop new approaches to understanding, predicting and controlling turbulence through theory, computation, artificial intelligence and experimentation.