Alexis Kaminski
University of California Berkeley
Seminar Information
Engineering Building Unit 2 (EBU2)
Room 479
Seminar Recording Available: Please contact seminar coordinator, Jake Blair at (j1blair@eng.ucsd.edu)
Turbulent mixing plays an important role in the ocean, and understanding where and how it occurs is a key problem in physical oceanography. Ocean mixing events are commonly modelled in terms of stratified shear instabilities. However, most idealized studies of stratified shear instabilities assume that the shear interface and buoyancy interface are coincident. When asymmetry is introduced into the background density and velocity profiles, the resulting instabilities can exhibit features of both Holmboe and Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instabilities - details which have important implications for the interpretation of oceanographic data. In this talk, I will present results from simulations of such asymmetric flows, including a framework for predicting the nature of the linear instability, details of the resulting nonlinear flow evolution, and implications for modelling the resulting turbulent mixing.
Dr. Alexis Kaminski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley. She received a BSc and MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Berkeley ME in 2021, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University and at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory. Her research focuses on the fluid dynamics of flows in the natural environment, in particular oceanic flows. She is interested in problems involving waves, instabilities, and turbulence in stratified flows, ranging from highly-idealized simulations of turbulence mixing events to the interpretation of real-world observations of the upper ocean.