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Imperial College London

Van Reeuwijk Lab

From city streets to cloud edges, we study how turbulence carries heat, particles, and pollutants and how this impacts the environment.

We develop the numerical, theoretical, and data-driven tools needed to study environmental turbulence: DNS and LES, reduced-order models, data assimilation, machine-learning surrogates, and the open-source urban LES code uDALES.

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Turbulent environmental flow visualisation
11
current members
21
alumni
104
publications
11
datasets
17
open-source repos

Interactive demos

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We enjoy working with models and the tools around them. The demos below are a taster of the kind of problems we study — runnable in your browser, drawn directly from the lab's research.

Wind in urban terrain

Place rectangular buildings on a top-down city plan, rotate the wind direction, and watch the particle field show channelling, wakes, and stagnation zones.

interactive

Gravity currents — the lock-release experiment

Pour something dense into something lighter and it doesn't sit still — it races along the bottom in a head-and-tail structure with a remarkably steady speed. Compare the simulated current with a two-layer shallow-water prediction.

interactive

Rayleigh–Bénard convection — patterns from heat

Heat the bottom of a fluid layer, cool the top, and watch patterns emerge. Adjust the Rayleigh number to walk from conduction through cells to soft turbulence.

interactive

How urban surfaces respond to a diurnal cycle

A 1D surface energy balance running live in the browser — pick a material, change the forcing, watch the heat wave penetrate the wall.

interactive

Surface energy balance, face by face

How uDALES resolves the energy budget on every roof, wall and pavement in an urban block — and how we read those outputs with the udbase Python tools.

notebook

Patterns from chaos — symmetric fractals

A simple complex map iterated millions of times produces intricate, symmetry-respecting patterns — a small window onto the kind of scale-invariant structure that pervades turbulent flows.

interactive

Latest research

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