Associate ProfessorNicholas Williamson

A major thread of his work explores how turbulence emerges, develops, and self-organises in vertical natural convection boundary layers, where shear and buoyancy interact in non-trivial ways.The work is important to a wide range of industrial and environmental flows, including large-scale convection on solar thermal towers, icebergs, and inside cryogenic tanks.

Another key interest is on stably stratified open channel flows, focusing on stably stratified channel (river) flow and examining and parameterising the mixing. The work has wide application but has immediate application to thermally stratified river flows which occur in Australian rivers in low flow conditions and lead to Algal blooms, Dissolved oxygen depletion, and fish kill events.  The work has lead to the development of hydraulic models currently used by Catchment Managers.