Leonardo Chamorro
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Engineering
Moving water and air carry swirling structures that decide how much drag objects feel, how sediment moves and how spinning machines perform. These flows are hard to predict, and the cost of studying them at full scale limits engineering and environmental design.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
fluid mechanics
turbulence
rotor wakes
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Test whether matching rotor thrust and induced power coefficient reproduces vortex wake turbulence and stability across scales, using inverse blade design and Large Eddy Simulation with actuator lines.
- Measure rotor blade loads and wake behavior in three wind tunnels to probe roughness, rotation, sheared turbulent inflow and platform motion, and build a public rotor wake database.
- Quantify how clay concentration shifts the transition from laminar to turbulent flow under high-frequency oscillatory shear, using transparent Laponite suspensions in a custom flume with optical measurements.
- Characterize how smooth surfaces and organized or random roughness shape turbulence in clay-laden boundary layers, deriving scaling laws in terms of concentration, frequency, amplitude and roughness.
- Measure drag and flow around rigid and flexible vegetation canopies with flow and object tracking experiments, complemented by simulations of local drag within canopies.
- Train artificial neural networks on canopy experiment and simulation data to develop a generalized formulation for predicting vegetation canopy drag.
More about the research
The lab's projects combine laboratory flow experiments with computer simulation to find scaling rules that link small experiments to real systems. They study three settings: the wakes behind spinning rotors, water carrying clay, and rivers flowing through aquatic plants.
Why it matters
These projects could make wind tunnel testing of helicopters, propellers, drones, energy devices and heart pumps cheaper by validating small-scale models. Scaling laws for clay-laden flows could improve flood risk assessment, water quality monitoring, slurry transport and the design of hydraulic structures. A generalized canopy drag formula could support river habitat restoration, flood management and renewable energy design. All three projects will release public datasets.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Fundamental Scaling of Rotating Wakes
NSF · Jul 2025 – Jun 2028
Quantifying unsteady shear effects on clay-loaded media: stability and surface roughness implications
NSF · May 2025 – Apr 2028
Collaborative Research: Generalizing Drag Estimation for Rigid and Flexible Vegetation Canopies to Quantify Environmental Processes
NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2027
Closest labs
Sven Schmitz
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Test whether rotor thrust and induced power coefficient, rather than total power coefficient, are sufficient conditions for reproducing vortex wake turbulence and stability when a rotor is scaled down for wind tunnel testing.
Rajat Mittal
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Engineering
Extend the Force Partitioning Method, which splits drag into vortex, viscous and shear contributions, to turbulent flow over smooth, transitionally rough, fully rough and patchy walls using direct numerical simulations.
Jane Bae
California Institute of Technology, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Analyze high-resolution flow data to determine how the directionality (anisotropy) of unresolved small-scale turbulent motion behaves in attached and separating flows near walls.
The school
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 41 labs on PI Pages, $907M a year on research, 870 research doctorates a year.
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