Members of the Flow Editorial Board have each selected one recent article to highlight as an example of the best and brightest being published in the journal.

Read on to discover the selected articles and the editors’ insights. As always these articles are Open Access, freely accessible forever.

• ‘Cardiovascular fluid dynamics: a journey through our circulation’ by Karthik Menon, Zinan Hu and Alison L. Marsden

Editor-in-Chief: Juan G. Santiago
“In this review of cardiovascular fluid mechanics by the Marsden lab, we “Flow” along and through the circulatory system, encountering a range of scales, flow, and analysis regimes.  It offers an excellent introduction to non-specialist in the field.”

• ‘An extension of Thwaites’ method for turbulent boundary layers’ by Rahul Agrawal, Sanjeeb T. Bose, Kevin P. Griffin and Parviz Moin

Bharath Ganapathisubramani
“This paper revisits a classical method with an updated data-driven approach. This should allow for better prediction of turbulent boundary layer properties in early stages of design across different applications.”

• ‘Drag prediction of rough-wall turbulent flow using data-driven regression’ by Zhaoyu Shi, Seyed Morteza Habibi Khorasani, Heesoo Shin et al.

Nicholas Hutchins
“This paper tackles the very important real-world challenge of predicting drag in rough-wall bounded turbulent flows, purely from surface topography – a problem that vexes ship and aircraft operators. The paper compares many different data-driven approaches, using a training dataset that is unprecedented in scale. The aspect I particularly appreciate is the attempt to reduce complexity by extracting a minimum set of topographical properties for accurate prediction.”

• ‘Thermally-driven cross-shore flows in stratified basins: a review on the thermal siphon dynamics’ by Damien Bouffard, Tomy Doda, Cintia L. Ramón and Hugo N. Ulloa

Gregory N. Ivey
“The biogeochemical functioning of aquatic ecosystems is controlled by the transport and distribution of heat, mass and nutrients. While vertical transport is well understood, this review article provides a comprehensive insight into the important, yet relatively poorly understood, thermally-driven lateral transport between shallow coastal and deeper offshore waters. Operating daily and seasonally, understanding and modelling these lateral exchange flows is key to understanding the functioning and hence the environmental management of a wide range of water bodies, ranging from freshwater lakes to coastal ocean regions.”

• ‘Morphological evolution of splashing drop revealed by interpretation of explainable artificial intelligence’ by Jingzu Yee, Shunsuke Kumagai, Daichi Igarashi et al.

Cunjing Lv
“This paper introduces a novel feature extraction method and an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) video classifier to analyze the relation between the morphological evolution of a splashing drop and the impact force on solid surfaces. This XAI-based approach offers an alternative to traditional methods, providing new perspectives into the dynamics of drop impact and the physical parameters involved. The proposed approach has broad applications across various intriguing fields related to drop dynamics, devices and systems.”

• ‘A Review of Underwater Shock and Fluid-Structure Interactions’ by Helio Matos, Mike Galuska, Carlos Javier et al.

Maurizio Porfiri
“This comprehensive review provides key engineering insights for the design of marine systems to withstand underwater explosions. The study enhances our understanding of shock wave propagation, bubble dynamics, and fluid-structure interactions by integrating fluid mechanics, materials science, and structural engineering. The insights offered by the authors are essential for advancing maritime technology, improving the safety of undersea operations, and mitigating environmental impacts.”

• ‘On the thermal effect of porous material in porous media Rayleigh-Bénard convection’ by Jun Zhong, Shuang Liu and Chao Sun

Shu Takagi
“They conducted two-dimensional numerical simulations to investigate the thermal effect of porous materials in Rayleigh-Bénard convection within porous media. The results explicitly show that increasing the thermal conductivity of porous media does not necessarily enhance heat transfer. The utilization of convection plays an important role and depending on the thermal conductivity of the porous media, the flow fields are significantly affected. This may result in a reduction of heat transfer rather than an enhancement. This phenomenon is discussed in detail with quantitative analysis, providing valuable insights for the design of heat transfer devices using porous media.”

• ‘Disentangling coexisting sensory pathways of interaction in schooling fish’ by Rishita Das, Sean D. Peterson and Maurizio Porfiri

Lisa Fauci
“The beautiful patterns observed in fish schooling are intriguing examples of emergent collective behavior.  Do individuals in the school interact through visual signaling, acoustic signaling, hydrodynamics,  or some combination of these?  In this paper, the authors present a clever, controlled physical experiment to simulate the interaction of two in-line swimming fish aiming to segregate the effects of hydrodynamic and electromechanical pathways.   By measuring the effects of a pitching airfoil on a compliant sheet,  an information-theoretic approach is used to uncover causal influence in modes of interaction.  This data-driven approach serves as a model that can be used to untangle pathways of interactions in other complex biological systems. “

• Multi-scale Flow Structure and its Effect on Momentum Flux in the Coastal Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer, by Xueling Cheng, Qilong Li, Hongyan Chen et al.

Xiaojing Zheng
“This paper demonstrates outstanding innovation in applied fluid dynamics research. By employing multi-scale turbulence decomposition, wavelet transforms, and finite element methods, it systematically analyzes the momentum flux characteristics in coastal areas with complex terrain. The study reveals interaction mechanisms between large-scale vortices and small-scale turbulent flows, while highlighting the significant influence of topography on drag coefficients—providing novel insights for turbulence model optimization. With rigorous experimental design integrating high-precision observations and advanced algorithms, it offers critical methodological references for atmospheric boundary layer research, exhibiting remarkable academic value and practical application potential.”

• Uniformly distributed floor sources of buoyancy can give rise to significant spatial inhomogeneities within rooms by Carolanne V.M. Vouriot, Thomas D. Higton, P.F. Linden et al.

Lydia Bourouiba
“Guidance on healthy indoor ventilation (e.g. ASHRAE Standard 241) typically assumes well-mixed conditions, using bulk ventilation rates per person or air exchange rates. This paper, through experiments and simulations, shows that contrary to expectation, idealized displacement ventilation can exhibit significant horizontal inhomogeneities. Depending on inlet/outlet placement, dead zones and contaminant recirculation regions can form, potentially altering the occupants’ exposure to contaminants. These findings challenge the prevalent homogeneous or well-mixed assumption and have critical implications for risk modeling and healthy building design.”

• Regulating nanofibril assembly using diverse flow focusing channels by Kosuke Osawa, V. Krishne Gowda, Tomas Rosén et al.

Carl Meinhart
“Is it possible to use flow-focusing microfluidics to assemble macroscale threadlike materials from naturally-occurring nanoscale fibrils? This is a question that investigators are trying to answer in a recent article published in FLOW.
In this work, researchers use a combination of numerical simulations and experimental measurements to explore various microfluidic parameters, such as confluence angles, channel aspect ratios, and channel contractions, to determine suitable conditions for spinning stiff filaments from cellulose nanofibrils that are 10-100 nm in size.  The results of this work could lead to new methods for material manufacturing that have the promise of addressing sustainability, by decreasing our dependence on fossil-based material sources.”

Read the article collection

Flow focuses on the applications of fluid mechanics to technology, natural, and medical sciences, and descriptions of the physical world. An open access companion journal to the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Flow is a translational journal that seeks to leverage the principles and tools of fluid mechanics and transport phenomena to enable devices and systems that benefit humankind, or provide scientific insights into nature. The novelty of published work can be in an analysis method, application or their combinations. Applications can also include non-fluid systems. Papers should be intelligible to a broad scientific audience.