Fluid Dynamics in Salt Lake City

I have blogged previously about attending the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego (2018) for the first (and so far only) time, and the APS March Meeting in Las Vegas (2023), my fourth time attending that meeting.  I don't typically blog about the conferences I attend, but it behooves me to post today about one more, the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics annual meeting, which took place last week (Nov. 24-26) in Salt Lake City.  This is because fluid dynamics has been a central part of my scientific career, as well as a cornerstone of this blog.  Indeed, the Salt Lake City meeting was my sixth DFD.  My previous five have all been after I left graduate school:

• 2003:  Meadowlands, NJ.
• 2005:  Chicago, IL
• 2009:  Minneapolis, MN
• 2012:  San Diego, CA
• 2014:  San Francisco, CA

As can be seen, I had not attended DFD in exactly a decade.  Partly this is because I decided at the 2014 meeting that the APS March Meeting was probably of greater interest to me than a conference specialized in fluid mechanics, especially since the March Meeting had plenty of fluids sessions itself.  However, the March Meeting tends to be attended by physicists who do fluids; while DFD is dominated by engineers, applied mathematicians, and various Earth & planetary scientists who do fluids -- a much better representative group of this discipline. However I have found in my latter years that my interests in fluid mechanics tends towards historical, pedagogical, and foundational issues, rather than the cutting edge of research, which is what DFD showcases.  Nonetheless, attending DFD once a decade, while attending the March Meeting more often, may be quite appropriate in order to nourish my intellectual interests in physics and fluid mechanics.

Anyhow, this year's DFD was held at the Salt Palace convention center in downtown Salt Lake City.

The West Temple entrance to the Salt Palace Convention Center

I arrived on Saturday evening Nov. 23 to pick up my badge, but through a different entrance where a cheer-leading competition was taking place!  There was glitter all over the carpet, and children practicing their routines in the hallway.  I ran into a colleague in the hallway who must have seen my utterly bewildered expression, and he kindly directed me towards the DFD registration area.  Here is a shot of that part of the convention center at a calmer moment.

The DFD registration area at the Salt Palace Convention Center, as seen from near the West Temple entrance.

The meeting got going promptly at 8am Sunday morning, while the evening reception ran well into the night.  I don't think I headed back to my hotel until around 9pm that night, despite having forgotten that I had been given two free drink tickets for the reception.  (Thus I never used those tickets.)  The second morning session on Sunday featured a new "Interact" poster session, which began with one-minute flash talks by each poster presenter, followed by time for the audience to speak with the poster presenters one-on-one.  I attended the session on Rayleigh-Benard convection, which was graced by two top figures in the field:  Robert Ecke and K. R. Sreenivasan.  Unfortunately the latter's poster consisted of printouts of a recent paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the author did not stay very long, as I'm sure he had other people's posters in other sessions that he wanted to see.  Logistically, the flash talk portion of the session was difficult to execute gracefully, despite everyone's best efforts.  I'm not sure if this was much of an improvement over a regular poster session.

Hall C, where many of the plenary events, including the awards session, took place.

After lunch, the awards session took place in Hall C, presided over by this year's DFD chair, Peko Hosoi of MIT.  The reception, which was not a full scale banquet, took place in the exhibit hall (Hall A) at 7pm.

Entrance to Hall A, the exhibit area.

In the previous 5 DFD meetings, the reception included a real banquet.  Most memorable for me were the receptions for the 2003 and 2012 DFD meetings.  In 2003, the reception was held at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park of New York City.  Buses were provided to take us there.  I recall having conversations with Stephen W. Morris and (more briefly) Troy Shinbrot there.  At dinner I was seated with a professor and his wife, of Eastern European origin, whose names I cannot recall.  I remember the conversation turning toward the professor's son, who had pursued a non-lucrative career in avant-garde film-making.  Alas, the good professor appears to have been incredibly disappointed with his son's career choice.  He seemed to praise my contrasting choice to pursue a scientific career, albeit not one centered in academia, and not even closely related to fluid dynamics.  At the 2012 DFD reception, I befriended a French post-doc, and after dinner we went for a long walk along the marina, almost reaching the U.S.S. Midway, before turning back.  The post-doc had once worked for a technology start up, but their product, while technically quite innovative, provided only a marginal practical improvement over its existing competitors, and customers found it difficult to justify the cost (not just financial, but in requiring specialized training) to use the product.  It was a sound lesson in scientific entrepreneurship.  Eventually I began peppering him with questions about French politics and culture (this was the era of the presidencies of Monsieurs Sarkozy and Hollande).

Alas at this year's reception, I didn't have any interesting conversations at all.  I have also noticed across several conferences that I've attended this year that there are fewer exhibitors, especially book exhibitors.  Here, only SIAM and Cambridge University Press were purveying books (the latter was also promoting the Journal of Fluid Mechanics), while AIP Publishing and APS' Physical Review Fluids were hawking their journals.  I placed an order for two books with SIAM, and picked up a book (60% discount with reservation if picked up on site) from Cambridge, Joseph Powers' Mechanics of Fluids, which look to be very promising.  After returning home I placed an additional order for more Cambridge books, using the meeting 30% discount code.  I've felt for over a decade that they are the lead publisher in fluid mechanics, and I am pleased that they have not yet abandoned the conference circuit, though they may be feeling less and less competition these days.  JFM was celebrating its 1000th volume, and a commemorative brochure was distributed at the conference, which I think will be a lovely keepsake.  However, unlike the previous DFDs I've attended, there was no brochure prepared regarding the Gallery of Fluid Motion entrees.

Monday morning I mainly attended the Education and Outreach session, which featured many talks on in-class lab demos as well as alternatives to traditional textbooks.  I then attended the Fluids Education lunch, which was not clearly described ahead of time.  It turned out to be a panel discussion with lunch provided.  The table I sat at was not very talkative at all, so it wasn't a very social event, unlike the various mixers featured at other conferences I've attended this year.  Monday afternoon featured a poster session.  I zeroed in on one poster that was closely related to my graduate work from over 20 years ago, and while initially the presenters were absent, two of the authors eventually turned up, and I was able to talk to them.  There were also at least two rather controversial posters, which I will not discuss here, as they do not deserve any further attention.  (I am told that an ethics complaint was filed with APS regarding one of them.)

That evening, attendees were invited to visit the Leonardo Museum, a few blocks away, which currently has a major exhibit on flight, as well as smaller exhibits on AI, water, and a special exhibit related to the meeting, the Traveling Gallery of Fluid Motion (TGFM).  This is the second year of the TGFM, and this year's exhibit is titled "Spiraling Upwards".  For an additional $15, we could attend a private reception welcoming the TGFM, where the artists (one was a real artist, the others were DFD researchers) each gave a few words about their works.

The Leonardo Museum in Salt Lake City.

The Leonardo Museum was quite an appropriate venue for this event, as Leonardo DaVinci, its namesake, was a keen observer of fluid motion, and he rediscovered what we call the hydraulic continuity equation, a precursor of the mass balance principle in modern fluid dynamics.

I attended additional sessions on Tuesday, though I took a long lunch break to enjoy pho at a busy downtown eatery called Tamarind, which I highly recommend!

I've been away from physics and fluid mechanics for over two decades, so unlike conferences in my current field, where I constantly run into people I know, I am very much an outsider at the March Meeting and DFD conferences.  Indeed, I met only 3 people that I knew from before at this year's DFD, though I intend to reach out to a few others whom I met there and have some professional interests with.