Final Report Summary - EUHIT (European High-performance Infrastructures in Turbulence)
Executive Summary:
The European High-Performance Infrastructures in Turbulence research or EuHIT has been a full success. It has integrated the community even beyond the level envisioned when the grant was given. EuHIT has succeeded in fostering innovation and a culture of cooperation through transnational access at Europe’s leading turbulence research infrastructures and data facility. Networking has solidified a community of turbulence researchers that is singular in the world (and for which the world envies us). This is exemplified by the fact that researchers as far away as Australia have participated in measurement campaigns of EuHIT. EuHIT made 14 calls for the use of the research infrastructures, with 74 proposals submitted and evaluated, 69 granted with some changes after renegotiations, and 56 measurement campaigns at the infrastructures were very successfully conducted with lead investigators from more than 10 European countries. Five scientific workshops with more than 190 participants brought together scientists from industry and academia. The EuHIT school in Warsaw Poland has educated more than 100 young researchers from more than 25 nations from Europe and around the world in the most advanced science topics of turbulence and its applications. The well-structured school has provided the next generation of researchers with the cutting edge knowledge much needed in European industry and academia. Next to the research infrastructures, the Digital Library of Turbulence Data (TurBase) has acquired all the data from measurement campaigns in a format that will make the data available after an initial embargo period. With that TurBase is developing into the first European data infrastructure for experimental, as well as numerical data. Indeed, it promises to become the first comprehensive data infrastructure for experimental data worldwide. The state-of-the-art website of EuHIT (www.EuHIT.org) and its cousin ICTR (International Collaboration for Turbulence Research http://ictr.euhit.org) is continuing to support the networking of European turbulence researchers. In addition, it is informing the interested public about the research facilities and EuHIT’s scientific accomplishments through open access publications. On www.EuHIT.org the research infrastructures of EuHIT are presented not only to scientist, but also to the public by high quality videos.
The quality of EuHIT was also remarked upon by a member of the Scientific Advisory Board: "The technical program was outstanding and wide-ranging. The array of facilities, and the multi-national activities in them, as reported in the workshop, are outstanding. Eu-HIT has clearly assembled a world-leading suite of capabilities, as was your proposed intention. Moreover, the consortium activities have clearly developed well beyond the “sum of the parts”; I heard of a range of significant international exchanges and collaborations that have developed as a result of the consortium. In short, I observed a coherent European community of turbulence researchers, united by investigation of turbulence... In short, I was extremely impressed with Eu-HIT and applaud you (the EU) for your efforts to lead the community in an area so key to human endeavor with respect to the environment, transportation and health. I do hope that a continuation of this consortium can be sought and successfully supported. This is truly a world-leading effort.”
In summary: EuHIT provided a networking structure fostering a culture of co-operation through science management, communication tools, dissemination of knowledge, good practice, and human resource development. It provided improved data sharing/ handling; innovative instrumentation for the joint use at the research infrastructures that are also portable to general R&D.; and gives free access to the Digital Library of Turbulence Data TurBase, which ensures stable service to best available data by providing optimal data use, download, and upload.
Overall, the members and users of EuHIT thank the European Community for creating through its infrastructure program a vibrant community for scientific exchange in turbulence research within Europe and the world.
Project Context and Objectives:
What is EuHIT?
EuHIT is a consortium that integrates cutting-edge European facilities for turbulence research across national boundaries. It advances very significantly the competitive edge of European turbulence research with special focus on providing the knowledge for technological innovation and for addressing grand societal challenges.
The members of EuHIT include 25 research institutes and 2 industrial partners from 10 European countries. Total 14 cutting-edge turbulence research infrastructures, most of which are developed on national funds and are run by EuHIT member institutes, constitute the material basis of EuHIT. A Networking Program and Joint Research Activities within EuHIT interconnect these research infrastructures, together with the knowledge developed upon them.
The main components of EuHIT may be summarized briefly as:
Integration: Not only the research activities at the infrastructures, but also the training programs, the sharing of data, and the interaction with numerical modeling and theoretical analyses are all integrated under EuHIT. This facilitates access to the infrastructures and easy exchange of instruments, techniques, data, and new ideas.
Innovation: New techniques, algorithms, and next generation instruments are developed through Joint Research Activities (JRAs) to maintain the EuHIT infrastructures at the leading edge.
Dissemination: New tools and procedures are implemented to foster easy and open access to data and techniques developed from EuHIT, including the transfer of knowledge from academia to industries.
EuHIT was selected from the Integrated Infrastructure Initiative call “FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2012” by European Research Commission: INFRA-2012-1.1.20. Infrastructures for studying turbulence phenomena and applications. "There is a need for detailed understanding of turbulence phenomena. A project under this topic should aim at bringing together key facilities addressing the turbulence phenomena in various areas of science and technology. A combination of modeling and experimental in situ testing is needed."
EuHIT was created as advances in key economical and societal issues facing Europe are obstructed by the lack of understanding of turbulence. These challenges include ground-, air- and sea-transport, energy generation and delivery, processing in chemical industries, marine biosphere management, climate change impact, atmospheric and marine pollution prediction, and carbon capture and storage processes. The reason lies in the fact that turbulent flows underlie all macroscopic natural and technological flows as soon as mass transport is large. In the past twenty years, especially with EuHIT, Europe has surpassed all other nations in research output and development of national infrastructures in turbulence research and its applications. With EuHIT the European wide integration is reaching its full potential for innovation in the sciences and technologies.
The creation of EuHIT itself represents an optimization in community actions. EuHIT has changed the way turbulence research facilities operate, evolve and interact with each other and with users from academia and industry. EuHIT optimizes the research facilities for the future and is impacting innovation in European R&D.
Project Results:
EuHIT comprises 25 Work packages in total. These are summarized below, together with their respective achievements. They constitute the main science and technology results and foregrounds:
Work Package 1: Management
The management of the EuHIT project ensured a flexible and efficient coordination of all activities in and between all work packages of the whole project and administrative support of the Coordinator at consortium level. In this respect, transnational access to research infrastructures was coordinated, decisions of the General Assembly were led, achievements were assessed according to agreements on deliverables and milestones, reports were collected, coordination between the partners and the EU was established and maintained, tranches were distributed among the partners, and meetings were organized. Costs were optimized and reallocated by decisions of the General Assembly following an application procedure, which agreed on budgets for new deliverables.
Work Package 2: Synergy and communication
In this Work Package the EuHIT state of the art web-portal was designed, developed and maintained. To this day EuHIT.org serves as an entry point for EuHIT for the broad audience. It is a reliable and comprehensive platform for managing TNAs and for exchanging information and for dissemination of progress. EuHIT.org is a visible, searchable and mature website with large community of users - at the end of the project there were more than 500 users registered. Besides that, the EuHIT consortium members organized major events dedicated to EuHIT, from consortium meetings to a large EuHIT Conference. Transparent online selection procedures for users of the transnational access were designed, implemented and maintained as a part of the EuHIT web portal. EuHIT.org includes a system for online proposal management:
• Proposal management, edition and submission by the user,
• Two stage proposal reviewing process including review by the Research Infrastructure representative and peer review by two independent External Reviewers,
• Proposal evaluation and management by the Coordiantor;
• Proposal evaluation by the Selection Panel, including online voting;
• The full release provides internal tool for networking and dissemination, which is the “EuHIT Drive”, a comprehensive, multi-sharing point for EuHIT users. Moreove, external networking tool – Cisco WebEx Meeting Centre – was made available to all members of EuHIT.
The user access within the EuHIT project was organized in periodic calls with individual proposals for experiments at the involved Research Infrastructures (RI).
We have had a total number of 14 calls.
We have had a total number of 74 proposals.
We have approved for funding a total number of 69 proposals.
We have received appropriate final reports for a total number of 56 experiments (requirement for the reimbursement process). The statistics of the user access under the EuHIT funding, as well as, details of the experiments are publicly available on the web portal www.euhit.org.
The EuHIT Kick-off meeting took place on May 13, 2013 at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Am Faßberg 11, Ludwig Prandtl Hörsaal with 41 participants. The 2nd EuHIT meeting took place on May 12-13, 2014 at Conferentiehotel Drienerburght in the University of Twente, the Netherlands with 37 participants. The 3rd EuHIT meeting took place on May 11-12, 2015 in Grenoble, France, with 35 participants. It was organized by two partners, LEGI and CEA and took place at two locations, the LEGI, 1211 Rue de la Piscine, Saint Martin d’Hères; and CEA Grenoble, 17 rue des Martyrs, Grenoble. The EuHIT Conference and Final GA meeting took place on May 2-4, 2016 in Göttingen, Germany with 53 participants. It was organized by MPIDS, Göttingen.
Work Package 3: Innovation through integration
This work package increased the potential of the EuHIT research infrastructures for innovation by stimulating and supporting partnership and transfer of knowledge with industry, and by fostering the use of the EuHIT research infrastructures by industrial researchers. Collaborations with industry were initiated and were continuously intensified. Various contacts and cooperations exist with e.g. Dantec Dynamics (Skovlunde, Denmark), German Aerospace Center (Göttingen, Germany), LaVision (Göttingen, Germany), Vision Research (Wayne, USA), Innolas (Krailling, Germany). The EuHIT Project had four main directions within its dissemination Activities. The primary dissemination tool was the web-portal, EuHIT.org. To this day, it is a visible and searchable entry-point to the project. One can reach it easily using all main search engines. Besides that, the EuHIT consortium members have organized a set of dedicated events such as workshops, conferences and a summer school. Such events not only helped new users to know the project better and learn something about experiments in turbulence but also promoted face-to-face contacts with Research Infrastructure’s staff. Yet another way of letting others know about the project was consortium member’s participation and display of EuHIT in workshops, conferences, etc. For example, EuHIT was present at European Turbulence conferences and the Divison of Fluid Dynamics Meeting in the USA, the latter was organized in the booth of LaVision for better visibility. This kind of dissemination increased the visibility of the project, as well as, the awareness of EuHIT among some atypical users. One more channel of dissemination was through peer-reviewed papers published in high-impact journals. As a result of these Dissemination Activities both the EuHIT project and the consortium have gained visibility; and EuHIT achieved a high level of recognition in the world’s turbulence community and beyond. Five Scientific Workshops were organized by the TNA facilities of EuHIT:
• Wall Turbulence and Advanced Measurement Techniques (beneficiary CNRS), May 18-19, 2015
• EuHIT Cryogenic Turbulence Workshop (beneficiaries CERN, CUNI, CEA, ICTP), Oct. 26-29, 2015
• High-Reynolds Number Turbulent Flows (beneficiaries UNIBO, UNITO), Sep. 5-6, 2016
• Göttingen (beneficiary MPIDS), Feb. 14, 2017
• Ilmenau (beneficiary TUIL), Feb. 15-16, 2017
The EuHIT Summer School on Turbulence provided a comprehensive training for young, graduate and postgraduate researchers working in the broad area of turbulence science. The EuHIT School on Turbulence (4-6.07.2016) was combined with the EuroMech 8th European Postgraduate Fluid Dynamics Conference (6-9.07.2016). Together, these two events were further combined with the Warsaw Fluid Dynamics Week to reach full impact. More than one hundred participants had the unique opportunity to attend excellent lectures and training at the School, and to present and discuss results from their own work with the other participants and the high profile scientists.
Work Package 4: TurBase: Establishing a virtual turbulence research community
The development of a culture of cooperation between research infrastructures in the turbulence research community was further fostered through the creation of TurBase, an easily accessible knowledge-based infrastructure for high quality turbulence data. TurBase required a considerable collaborative and networking activity in order to pool and highlight the needs of the scientific communities, to establish common standards and metadata structures, to develop a suitable library of Application Programming Interface and to disseminate the acquired knowledge also outside EuHIT. TurBase is the backbone of the EuHIT integrated activity, which greatly facilitates the scientific objectives of the research infrastructures, as well as their mutual interactions. The activity produced the fundamental specifications necessary for the development of the library components and the access tools, improving dissemination and exploitation of scientific results obtained at the research infrastructures. The activity contributed to foster collaboration within the research community allowing benchmarks and validations of different data sets within the same data formats and improving the accessibility of data from all users. Definition of ‘best practices’ and deployment of standardized data promoted clustering of new research initiatives and helped the growth of a wider community in the European turbulence arena. The impact of TurBase extends well beyond the lifetime of EuHIT.
Work Package 5: Access to Göttingen High-Turbulence Facilities (GTF)
Three installations were accessible: the Göttingen Turbulence Wind Tunnel (GTF1), the Göttingen U-Boot (GTF2) and the Göttingen von Kármán mixer (GTF3). A total of four user groups accessed GTF1, four accessed GTF2 and three accessed GTF3.
Work Package 6: Access to Grenoble Helium Infrastructures
The SHREK and Hejet facilities have been in operation since the beginning of the EuHIT Contract (April 2013). This contract has been an opportunity to improve the flexibility and availability of these facilities. The SHREK facility was operational for 165 days (indeed 167, leading to slightly more than 20% => 165) for European Access, and the Hejet facility was accessed for 70 days. It is also worth mentioning that applications to the facilities came not only from the Community of Low Temperature Turbulence: indeed, half of them came from scientists interested in High Reynolds numbers, and not involved in superfluid turbulence.
Work Package 7: Access to Barrel of Ilmenau
Over the four years of the entire EuHIT project 215 user days were used (only 168 were considered). The projects conducted under the EuHIT agreement fostered the international collaboration between the project partners as well as the outreach to the scientific community. Almost all scientists involved in the various projects came together for a scientific workshop at the Research Infrastructure “Barrel of Ilmenau” on 15th and 16th February 2017. Potential users were invited who did not use the facility before. About 25 participants from five countries gave talks and visited the Barrel.
Work Package 8: Access to Twente Turbulence Facilities (TTF)
The Twente Instrumented Particles in Turbulence Experiments (TIPTE) investigated particle translation and rotation dynamics in homogenous and isotropic turbulence and in strong shear-induced turbulent flow. The project Rough_TC “Experimental investigation of highly turbulent Taylor- Couette flow” ran from week 13 up to week 44 of 2016 and finished successfully.
Work Package 9: Access to CICLoPE
The Long Pipe (LP) in CICLoPE (Centre for International Cooperation in Long Pipe Experiment) became operative and available for external user access in May 2014, as planned. Over the entire period of EuHIT in which the LP was operative (1/4/2014 – ongoing), the LP provided a total of 212 external user days, which were divided into 7 user projects.
Work Package 10: ICTP High Rayleigh Number Cryogenic Facility
The High Rayleigh Number Cryogenic Facility was involved in the EuHIT Cryogenic Turbulence Workshop held 26 - 29 October 2015 in Grenoble, France. The lab is undergoing renovation and updating and is prepared to receive new users in the future.
Work Package 11: CERN cryogenic turbulence Facility
The facility was opened to external users during the last 3 years of the EuHIT project, and for a total of 6 weeks of access. Given this limited access time and the long time required to plan and operate large scale cryogenic experiments, access has been open to groups of users, rather than separately to different users. Users from 4 institutes and 3 countries (France, Israel and Germany) took part in the project.
Work Package 12: Access to the Coriolis rotating platform at LEGI (Coriolis)
The new Coriolis facility has been partly finished by June 2014, but tests and adjustments had still to be done until the end of 2015, which was not appropriate for external access projects. Then access for external users was offered from May 2016 to March 2017. Finally, five access projects have been successfully performed, involving 135 access days, far exceeding the contractual minimum of 90 access days. This access involved 22 invited researchers from 7 countries.
Work Package 13: Access to LML wind tunnel
4 EuHIT projects were conducted in the LML wind tunnel. In addition, the LML uploaded data of a previous database of several experiments and numerical simulation of zero pressure gradient and adverse pressure gradient boundary layer flows to TurBase. Additional experiments were performed by LML to complement the database generated in the EuHIT project.
Work Package 14: Access to Czech Cryogenic Turbulence Facility (CCTF)
Two projects were performed in CCT2 and one in CCTF1. The facility decided not to claim access resources, due to the large amount of administrative work required, if compared to the actual amount of resources employed to perform experiments. In other words, solely travel expenses have been claimed, by the foreign researchers visiting the facility and by the Czech researchers taking part in the facility workshop.
Work Package 15: Access to Refractive Index Matched Tunnel of LSTM-Erlangen (RIMT)
Within EuHIT an active grid was designed and installed for RIMT. Nevertheless, there was no applicant to conduct research at RIMT. One important reason is the running fluid inside. The experiments can be conducted only by optical measurement methods and the test objects has to be designed from special glass so that the refractive index can be matched.
Work Package 16: Access to Cottbus turbulence experimental facilities
The CoGeoF setups are particularly useful for geophysical applications, e.g. for studies on rotating stratified flows. CoLaPipeF is designed and built up to investigate highly turbulent pipe flow with particular regard to the nature of transition, turbulent structures, scaling theory and turbulent transport processes at high Reynolds numbers. In total 13 projects were conducted at this facility.
Work Package 17: Access to Turin Rotating Platform Facility
TurLab had the access of seven experimental groups within EuHIT project.
Work Package 18: Digital Library of Turbulence Data (DLTD) – Service
DLTD provides the technical and hardware infrastructure to TurBase. The DLTD is based on the iRODS (Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) data system. The iRODS system provides an abstraction from the back-end storage resources, hiding their complexity to the users; it includes a rule engine able to trigger data changes and operations and it allows to manage data both via command line client and API. The DLTD includes a storage infrastructure with an advanced set of services, which can be used to efficiently move and preserve data. The DLTD hardware is currently hosted by the PICO cluster at CINECA. TurBase supports the interaction with different storage resources. This allows to manage a distributed storage environment based on TurBase, an important feature to improve the possibility of TurBase to survive the project. During the entire project, special effort was made to force EuHIT users to create and upload datasets. After the Steering Committee decision to force users to upload data in order to be refunded, the number of datasets significantly increased but a big percentage of datasets were created only in the very last part of the project.
Work Package 19: Next generation and innovative instrumentation
The work package 19 contained 3 individual main tasks, each of which is looked after by one project partner. First a new camera module was designed and built that increased the processing power of data recorded by high-speed cameras. Second intelligent particles were developed that are used as large tracer particles in water with onboard sensors. Third an existing prototype of an anemometer was vastly improved.
Work Package 20: Turbulence Generation
This work package developed methods to reach very high Reynolds number turbulence under well-defined controlled conditions, so as to understand the influence of inhomogeneity and anisotropy on flow dynamics, mixing and dispersion issues. The active grid for RIMT at FAU was designed and constructed. A prototype of fractal propeller has been designed and built.
Work Package 21: Cryogenic measurement technologies
Instrumentation is recognized as the main bottleneck in cryogenic turbulence experiments. This work package developed new measurement devices: customized rugged velocity and temperature probes for the cryogenic TNA; cantilever anemometer / heat flux probe, both for room-temperature and cryogenic conditions; micro-fabrication of a network of micro-films with a spatial resolution better than 10 microns, which can be used as thermometers or anemometers (when overheated) depending on the requirements of the experiment.
Work Package 22: Lagrangian measurement of turbulence with strong mean flows
This work package developed advanced technologies for 3D Lagrangian particle tracking (LPT) measurements, including calibration and analysis of measurement errors, suitable for turbulence with strong mean flows, which are present in a large number of facilities in EuHIT.
Work Package 23: Advanced Eulerian measurement techniques
New hot-wire and hot-film sensors for use at high Reynolds numbers were designed and fabricated. The probes are smaller than existing probes and the electronics is faster in order to resolve the full range of scales present in high Reynolds number flows. This is of fundamental importance not only for academic research, but also for engineering applications (e.g. friction on aircraft) and turbulence modeling (e.g. wall functions that are still based on the Kármán constant).
Work Package 24: Quality assessment of data and models
This work package confronted the results obtained by facilities and numerical work. It provides means to control the quality of the data, of assessing the validity of the working hypotheses, and identifying the limits of our current understanding, and gives recommendations where further research is needed.
Work Package 25: Particles and Fields
This work package developed experimental methods extending the reach of Lagrangian techniques in EuHIT TNAs in order to improve possible connections with Eulerian methods and to address questions related to fundamental aspects of turbulence, mixing, turbulence-particles interactions, etc..
Potential Impact:
EuHIT has been a true success. During the course of EuHIT we had a total number of 14 calls, received 74 proposals, of which 69 were approved for funding, and 56 access experiments were successfully completed. The project leaders came from Belgium (1), Czech Republic (2), France (21), Germany (8), Hungary (1), Israel (3), Italy (1), Netherlands (4), Norway (2), Poland (2), Spain (5), Sweden (1), and United Kingdom (13). The EuHIT Project had four main directions of Dissemination Activities. The primary dissemination avenue was the web-portal, EuHIT.org. It is a visible and searchable entry-point to the project. One can reach it easily using all main search engines. In addition, the EuHIT consortium members have organized a set of dedicated events such as workshops, conferences and a summer school. Such events not only helped new users to know the project better and learn something about experiments in turbulence but also promoted face-to-face contact with Research Infrastructure’s staff. Yet another way of letting others know about the project was consortium member’s participation in workshops, conferences etc. This kind of dissemination increased the visibility of the project as well as awareness of EuHIT among some a-typical users. The last channel of dissemination was through peer-reviewed papers published in high-impact journals. As a result of these Dissemination Activities both the EuHIT project and the consortium have gained visibility and recognizably in the turbulence community and beyond. Collaborations with industry have been initiated and continuously intensified. Various contacts and cooperations exist with e.g. Dantec Dynamics (Skovlunde, Denmark), German Aerospace Center (Göttingen, Germany), LaVision (Göttingen, Germany), Vision Research (Wayne, USA), Innolas (Krailling, Germany).
Five Scientific Workshops were performed by the TNA facilities of EuHIT. Instead of having individual workshops at each facility, facilities with common orientations joined to perform workshops together to maximize the impact on the scientific community and to better reach potential users. This way the respective facilities could better announce their special features in comparison to the other competitive facilities.
The performed workshops were
• Wall Turbulence and Advanced Measurement Techniques (beneficiary CNRS), May 18-19, 2015
• EuHIT Cryogenic Turbulence Workshop (beneficiaries CERN, CUNI, CEA, ICTP), Oct. 26-29, 2015
• High-Reynolds Number Turbulent Flows (beneficiaries UNIBO, UNITO), Sep. 5-6, 2016
• Göttingen (beneficiary MPIDS), Feb. 14, 2017
• Ilmenau (beneficiary TUIL), Feb.15-16 2017
The EuHIT Summer School on Turbulence was a huge success. It provided comprehensive training for young, graduate and postgraduate researchers working in the broad area of turbulence science. The EuHIT School on Turbulence (4-6.07.2016) was combined with the EuroMech 8th European Postgraduate Fluid Dynamics Conference (6-9.07.2016). More than one hundred participants had a unique opportunity to attend excellent lectures and trainings at the School and to present and discuss results of their own work at the Conference. The school achieved its goal to educate the workforce of the future in the most modern turbulence research. EuHIT has published its results at many conferences and in high ranking journals. More details on the dissemination details can be found at the web portal EuHIT.org.
In summary, EuHIT increased the relevance of world-class turbulence research infrastructures across Europe and enabled groundbreaking research and innovation. EuHIT provided free access to the knowledgebase for turbulence data; ensured stable and higher quality service; provided knowledge support, optimal data use, download, and upload capabilities, and ensured an editorial process of the knowledge-base. EuHIT provided a networking structure fostering a culture of co-operation through science management, communication tools, dissemination of knowledge, good practice, training, human resource development and to provide harmonized and enhanced interfaces. EuHIT innovated in enabling technologies and thorough integration, partnered with industry in instrument development, and attracted some industry users to the research infrastructures and the turbulence database. EuHIT enabled the evaluation of data quality, innovated instrumentation for the joint use at the research infrastructures (also portable to general R&D), implemented controlled turbulence generation, developed a quality assessment for data and models, enabled instrumentation, and it opened new directions in turbulence research and applications.
List of Websites:
www.euhit.org
The European High-Performance Infrastructures in Turbulence research or EuHIT has been a full success. It has integrated the community even beyond the level envisioned when the grant was given. EuHIT has succeeded in fostering innovation and a culture of cooperation through transnational access at Europe’s leading turbulence research infrastructures and data facility. Networking has solidified a community of turbulence researchers that is singular in the world (and for which the world envies us). This is exemplified by the fact that researchers as far away as Australia have participated in measurement campaigns of EuHIT. EuHIT made 14 calls for the use of the research infrastructures, with 74 proposals submitted and evaluated, 69 granted with some changes after renegotiations, and 56 measurement campaigns at the infrastructures were very successfully conducted with lead investigators from more than 10 European countries. Five scientific workshops with more than 190 participants brought together scientists from industry and academia. The EuHIT school in Warsaw Poland has educated more than 100 young researchers from more than 25 nations from Europe and around the world in the most advanced science topics of turbulence and its applications. The well-structured school has provided the next generation of researchers with the cutting edge knowledge much needed in European industry and academia. Next to the research infrastructures, the Digital Library of Turbulence Data (TurBase) has acquired all the data from measurement campaigns in a format that will make the data available after an initial embargo period. With that TurBase is developing into the first European data infrastructure for experimental, as well as numerical data. Indeed, it promises to become the first comprehensive data infrastructure for experimental data worldwide. The state-of-the-art website of EuHIT (www.EuHIT.org) and its cousin ICTR (International Collaboration for Turbulence Research http://ictr.euhit.org) is continuing to support the networking of European turbulence researchers. In addition, it is informing the interested public about the research facilities and EuHIT’s scientific accomplishments through open access publications. On www.EuHIT.org the research infrastructures of EuHIT are presented not only to scientist, but also to the public by high quality videos.
The quality of EuHIT was also remarked upon by a member of the Scientific Advisory Board: "The technical program was outstanding and wide-ranging. The array of facilities, and the multi-national activities in them, as reported in the workshop, are outstanding. Eu-HIT has clearly assembled a world-leading suite of capabilities, as was your proposed intention. Moreover, the consortium activities have clearly developed well beyond the “sum of the parts”; I heard of a range of significant international exchanges and collaborations that have developed as a result of the consortium. In short, I observed a coherent European community of turbulence researchers, united by investigation of turbulence... In short, I was extremely impressed with Eu-HIT and applaud you (the EU) for your efforts to lead the community in an area so key to human endeavor with respect to the environment, transportation and health. I do hope that a continuation of this consortium can be sought and successfully supported. This is truly a world-leading effort.”
In summary: EuHIT provided a networking structure fostering a culture of co-operation through science management, communication tools, dissemination of knowledge, good practice, and human resource development. It provided improved data sharing/ handling; innovative instrumentation for the joint use at the research infrastructures that are also portable to general R&D.; and gives free access to the Digital Library of Turbulence Data TurBase, which ensures stable service to best available data by providing optimal data use, download, and upload.
Overall, the members and users of EuHIT thank the European Community for creating through its infrastructure program a vibrant community for scientific exchange in turbulence research within Europe and the world.
Project Context and Objectives:
What is EuHIT?
EuHIT is a consortium that integrates cutting-edge European facilities for turbulence research across national boundaries. It advances very significantly the competitive edge of European turbulence research with special focus on providing the knowledge for technological innovation and for addressing grand societal challenges.
The members of EuHIT include 25 research institutes and 2 industrial partners from 10 European countries. Total 14 cutting-edge turbulence research infrastructures, most of which are developed on national funds and are run by EuHIT member institutes, constitute the material basis of EuHIT. A Networking Program and Joint Research Activities within EuHIT interconnect these research infrastructures, together with the knowledge developed upon them.
The main components of EuHIT may be summarized briefly as:
Integration: Not only the research activities at the infrastructures, but also the training programs, the sharing of data, and the interaction with numerical modeling and theoretical analyses are all integrated under EuHIT. This facilitates access to the infrastructures and easy exchange of instruments, techniques, data, and new ideas.
Innovation: New techniques, algorithms, and next generation instruments are developed through Joint Research Activities (JRAs) to maintain the EuHIT infrastructures at the leading edge.
Dissemination: New tools and procedures are implemented to foster easy and open access to data and techniques developed from EuHIT, including the transfer of knowledge from academia to industries.
EuHIT was selected from the Integrated Infrastructure Initiative call “FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2012” by European Research Commission: INFRA-2012-1.1.20. Infrastructures for studying turbulence phenomena and applications. "There is a need for detailed understanding of turbulence phenomena. A project under this topic should aim at bringing together key facilities addressing the turbulence phenomena in various areas of science and technology. A combination of modeling and experimental in situ testing is needed."
EuHIT was created as advances in key economical and societal issues facing Europe are obstructed by the lack of understanding of turbulence. These challenges include ground-, air- and sea-transport, energy generation and delivery, processing in chemical industries, marine biosphere management, climate change impact, atmospheric and marine pollution prediction, and carbon capture and storage processes. The reason lies in the fact that turbulent flows underlie all macroscopic natural and technological flows as soon as mass transport is large. In the past twenty years, especially with EuHIT, Europe has surpassed all other nations in research output and development of national infrastructures in turbulence research and its applications. With EuHIT the European wide integration is reaching its full potential for innovation in the sciences and technologies.
The creation of EuHIT itself represents an optimization in community actions. EuHIT has changed the way turbulence research facilities operate, evolve and interact with each other and with users from academia and industry. EuHIT optimizes the research facilities for the future and is impacting innovation in European R&D.
Project Results:
EuHIT comprises 25 Work packages in total. These are summarized below, together with their respective achievements. They constitute the main science and technology results and foregrounds:
Work Package 1: Management
The management of the EuHIT project ensured a flexible and efficient coordination of all activities in and between all work packages of the whole project and administrative support of the Coordinator at consortium level. In this respect, transnational access to research infrastructures was coordinated, decisions of the General Assembly were led, achievements were assessed according to agreements on deliverables and milestones, reports were collected, coordination between the partners and the EU was established and maintained, tranches were distributed among the partners, and meetings were organized. Costs were optimized and reallocated by decisions of the General Assembly following an application procedure, which agreed on budgets for new deliverables.
Work Package 2: Synergy and communication
In this Work Package the EuHIT state of the art web-portal was designed, developed and maintained. To this day EuHIT.org serves as an entry point for EuHIT for the broad audience. It is a reliable and comprehensive platform for managing TNAs and for exchanging information and for dissemination of progress. EuHIT.org is a visible, searchable and mature website with large community of users - at the end of the project there were more than 500 users registered. Besides that, the EuHIT consortium members organized major events dedicated to EuHIT, from consortium meetings to a large EuHIT Conference. Transparent online selection procedures for users of the transnational access were designed, implemented and maintained as a part of the EuHIT web portal. EuHIT.org includes a system for online proposal management:
• Proposal management, edition and submission by the user,
• Two stage proposal reviewing process including review by the Research Infrastructure representative and peer review by two independent External Reviewers,
• Proposal evaluation and management by the Coordiantor;
• Proposal evaluation by the Selection Panel, including online voting;
• The full release provides internal tool for networking and dissemination, which is the “EuHIT Drive”, a comprehensive, multi-sharing point for EuHIT users. Moreove, external networking tool – Cisco WebEx Meeting Centre – was made available to all members of EuHIT.
The user access within the EuHIT project was organized in periodic calls with individual proposals for experiments at the involved Research Infrastructures (RI).
We have had a total number of 14 calls.
We have had a total number of 74 proposals.
We have approved for funding a total number of 69 proposals.
We have received appropriate final reports for a total number of 56 experiments (requirement for the reimbursement process). The statistics of the user access under the EuHIT funding, as well as, details of the experiments are publicly available on the web portal www.euhit.org.
The EuHIT Kick-off meeting took place on May 13, 2013 at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Am Faßberg 11, Ludwig Prandtl Hörsaal with 41 participants. The 2nd EuHIT meeting took place on May 12-13, 2014 at Conferentiehotel Drienerburght in the University of Twente, the Netherlands with 37 participants. The 3rd EuHIT meeting took place on May 11-12, 2015 in Grenoble, France, with 35 participants. It was organized by two partners, LEGI and CEA and took place at two locations, the LEGI, 1211 Rue de la Piscine, Saint Martin d’Hères; and CEA Grenoble, 17 rue des Martyrs, Grenoble. The EuHIT Conference and Final GA meeting took place on May 2-4, 2016 in Göttingen, Germany with 53 participants. It was organized by MPIDS, Göttingen.
Work Package 3: Innovation through integration
This work package increased the potential of the EuHIT research infrastructures for innovation by stimulating and supporting partnership and transfer of knowledge with industry, and by fostering the use of the EuHIT research infrastructures by industrial researchers. Collaborations with industry were initiated and were continuously intensified. Various contacts and cooperations exist with e.g. Dantec Dynamics (Skovlunde, Denmark), German Aerospace Center (Göttingen, Germany), LaVision (Göttingen, Germany), Vision Research (Wayne, USA), Innolas (Krailling, Germany). The EuHIT Project had four main directions within its dissemination Activities. The primary dissemination tool was the web-portal, EuHIT.org. To this day, it is a visible and searchable entry-point to the project. One can reach it easily using all main search engines. Besides that, the EuHIT consortium members have organized a set of dedicated events such as workshops, conferences and a summer school. Such events not only helped new users to know the project better and learn something about experiments in turbulence but also promoted face-to-face contacts with Research Infrastructure’s staff. Yet another way of letting others know about the project was consortium member’s participation and display of EuHIT in workshops, conferences, etc. For example, EuHIT was present at European Turbulence conferences and the Divison of Fluid Dynamics Meeting in the USA, the latter was organized in the booth of LaVision for better visibility. This kind of dissemination increased the visibility of the project, as well as, the awareness of EuHIT among some atypical users. One more channel of dissemination was through peer-reviewed papers published in high-impact journals. As a result of these Dissemination Activities both the EuHIT project and the consortium have gained visibility; and EuHIT achieved a high level of recognition in the world’s turbulence community and beyond. Five Scientific Workshops were organized by the TNA facilities of EuHIT:
• Wall Turbulence and Advanced Measurement Techniques (beneficiary CNRS), May 18-19, 2015
• EuHIT Cryogenic Turbulence Workshop (beneficiaries CERN, CUNI, CEA, ICTP), Oct. 26-29, 2015
• High-Reynolds Number Turbulent Flows (beneficiaries UNIBO, UNITO), Sep. 5-6, 2016
• Göttingen (beneficiary MPIDS), Feb. 14, 2017
• Ilmenau (beneficiary TUIL), Feb. 15-16, 2017
The EuHIT Summer School on Turbulence provided a comprehensive training for young, graduate and postgraduate researchers working in the broad area of turbulence science. The EuHIT School on Turbulence (4-6.07.2016) was combined with the EuroMech 8th European Postgraduate Fluid Dynamics Conference (6-9.07.2016). Together, these two events were further combined with the Warsaw Fluid Dynamics Week to reach full impact. More than one hundred participants had the unique opportunity to attend excellent lectures and training at the School, and to present and discuss results from their own work with the other participants and the high profile scientists.
Work Package 4: TurBase: Establishing a virtual turbulence research community
The development of a culture of cooperation between research infrastructures in the turbulence research community was further fostered through the creation of TurBase, an easily accessible knowledge-based infrastructure for high quality turbulence data. TurBase required a considerable collaborative and networking activity in order to pool and highlight the needs of the scientific communities, to establish common standards and metadata structures, to develop a suitable library of Application Programming Interface and to disseminate the acquired knowledge also outside EuHIT. TurBase is the backbone of the EuHIT integrated activity, which greatly facilitates the scientific objectives of the research infrastructures, as well as their mutual interactions. The activity produced the fundamental specifications necessary for the development of the library components and the access tools, improving dissemination and exploitation of scientific results obtained at the research infrastructures. The activity contributed to foster collaboration within the research community allowing benchmarks and validations of different data sets within the same data formats and improving the accessibility of data from all users. Definition of ‘best practices’ and deployment of standardized data promoted clustering of new research initiatives and helped the growth of a wider community in the European turbulence arena. The impact of TurBase extends well beyond the lifetime of EuHIT.
Work Package 5: Access to Göttingen High-Turbulence Facilities (GTF)
Three installations were accessible: the Göttingen Turbulence Wind Tunnel (GTF1), the Göttingen U-Boot (GTF2) and the Göttingen von Kármán mixer (GTF3). A total of four user groups accessed GTF1, four accessed GTF2 and three accessed GTF3.
Work Package 6: Access to Grenoble Helium Infrastructures
The SHREK and Hejet facilities have been in operation since the beginning of the EuHIT Contract (April 2013). This contract has been an opportunity to improve the flexibility and availability of these facilities. The SHREK facility was operational for 165 days (indeed 167, leading to slightly more than 20% => 165) for European Access, and the Hejet facility was accessed for 70 days. It is also worth mentioning that applications to the facilities came not only from the Community of Low Temperature Turbulence: indeed, half of them came from scientists interested in High Reynolds numbers, and not involved in superfluid turbulence.
Work Package 7: Access to Barrel of Ilmenau
Over the four years of the entire EuHIT project 215 user days were used (only 168 were considered). The projects conducted under the EuHIT agreement fostered the international collaboration between the project partners as well as the outreach to the scientific community. Almost all scientists involved in the various projects came together for a scientific workshop at the Research Infrastructure “Barrel of Ilmenau” on 15th and 16th February 2017. Potential users were invited who did not use the facility before. About 25 participants from five countries gave talks and visited the Barrel.
Work Package 8: Access to Twente Turbulence Facilities (TTF)
The Twente Instrumented Particles in Turbulence Experiments (TIPTE) investigated particle translation and rotation dynamics in homogenous and isotropic turbulence and in strong shear-induced turbulent flow. The project Rough_TC “Experimental investigation of highly turbulent Taylor- Couette flow” ran from week 13 up to week 44 of 2016 and finished successfully.
Work Package 9: Access to CICLoPE
The Long Pipe (LP) in CICLoPE (Centre for International Cooperation in Long Pipe Experiment) became operative and available for external user access in May 2014, as planned. Over the entire period of EuHIT in which the LP was operative (1/4/2014 – ongoing), the LP provided a total of 212 external user days, which were divided into 7 user projects.
Work Package 10: ICTP High Rayleigh Number Cryogenic Facility
The High Rayleigh Number Cryogenic Facility was involved in the EuHIT Cryogenic Turbulence Workshop held 26 - 29 October 2015 in Grenoble, France. The lab is undergoing renovation and updating and is prepared to receive new users in the future.
Work Package 11: CERN cryogenic turbulence Facility
The facility was opened to external users during the last 3 years of the EuHIT project, and for a total of 6 weeks of access. Given this limited access time and the long time required to plan and operate large scale cryogenic experiments, access has been open to groups of users, rather than separately to different users. Users from 4 institutes and 3 countries (France, Israel and Germany) took part in the project.
Work Package 12: Access to the Coriolis rotating platform at LEGI (Coriolis)
The new Coriolis facility has been partly finished by June 2014, but tests and adjustments had still to be done until the end of 2015, which was not appropriate for external access projects. Then access for external users was offered from May 2016 to March 2017. Finally, five access projects have been successfully performed, involving 135 access days, far exceeding the contractual minimum of 90 access days. This access involved 22 invited researchers from 7 countries.
Work Package 13: Access to LML wind tunnel
4 EuHIT projects were conducted in the LML wind tunnel. In addition, the LML uploaded data of a previous database of several experiments and numerical simulation of zero pressure gradient and adverse pressure gradient boundary layer flows to TurBase. Additional experiments were performed by LML to complement the database generated in the EuHIT project.
Work Package 14: Access to Czech Cryogenic Turbulence Facility (CCTF)
Two projects were performed in CCT2 and one in CCTF1. The facility decided not to claim access resources, due to the large amount of administrative work required, if compared to the actual amount of resources employed to perform experiments. In other words, solely travel expenses have been claimed, by the foreign researchers visiting the facility and by the Czech researchers taking part in the facility workshop.
Work Package 15: Access to Refractive Index Matched Tunnel of LSTM-Erlangen (RIMT)
Within EuHIT an active grid was designed and installed for RIMT. Nevertheless, there was no applicant to conduct research at RIMT. One important reason is the running fluid inside. The experiments can be conducted only by optical measurement methods and the test objects has to be designed from special glass so that the refractive index can be matched.
Work Package 16: Access to Cottbus turbulence experimental facilities
The CoGeoF setups are particularly useful for geophysical applications, e.g. for studies on rotating stratified flows. CoLaPipeF is designed and built up to investigate highly turbulent pipe flow with particular regard to the nature of transition, turbulent structures, scaling theory and turbulent transport processes at high Reynolds numbers. In total 13 projects were conducted at this facility.
Work Package 17: Access to Turin Rotating Platform Facility
TurLab had the access of seven experimental groups within EuHIT project.
Work Package 18: Digital Library of Turbulence Data (DLTD) – Service
DLTD provides the technical and hardware infrastructure to TurBase. The DLTD is based on the iRODS (Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) data system. The iRODS system provides an abstraction from the back-end storage resources, hiding their complexity to the users; it includes a rule engine able to trigger data changes and operations and it allows to manage data both via command line client and API. The DLTD includes a storage infrastructure with an advanced set of services, which can be used to efficiently move and preserve data. The DLTD hardware is currently hosted by the PICO cluster at CINECA. TurBase supports the interaction with different storage resources. This allows to manage a distributed storage environment based on TurBase, an important feature to improve the possibility of TurBase to survive the project. During the entire project, special effort was made to force EuHIT users to create and upload datasets. After the Steering Committee decision to force users to upload data in order to be refunded, the number of datasets significantly increased but a big percentage of datasets were created only in the very last part of the project.
Work Package 19: Next generation and innovative instrumentation
The work package 19 contained 3 individual main tasks, each of which is looked after by one project partner. First a new camera module was designed and built that increased the processing power of data recorded by high-speed cameras. Second intelligent particles were developed that are used as large tracer particles in water with onboard sensors. Third an existing prototype of an anemometer was vastly improved.
Work Package 20: Turbulence Generation
This work package developed methods to reach very high Reynolds number turbulence under well-defined controlled conditions, so as to understand the influence of inhomogeneity and anisotropy on flow dynamics, mixing and dispersion issues. The active grid for RIMT at FAU was designed and constructed. A prototype of fractal propeller has been designed and built.
Work Package 21: Cryogenic measurement technologies
Instrumentation is recognized as the main bottleneck in cryogenic turbulence experiments. This work package developed new measurement devices: customized rugged velocity and temperature probes for the cryogenic TNA; cantilever anemometer / heat flux probe, both for room-temperature and cryogenic conditions; micro-fabrication of a network of micro-films with a spatial resolution better than 10 microns, which can be used as thermometers or anemometers (when overheated) depending on the requirements of the experiment.
Work Package 22: Lagrangian measurement of turbulence with strong mean flows
This work package developed advanced technologies for 3D Lagrangian particle tracking (LPT) measurements, including calibration and analysis of measurement errors, suitable for turbulence with strong mean flows, which are present in a large number of facilities in EuHIT.
Work Package 23: Advanced Eulerian measurement techniques
New hot-wire and hot-film sensors for use at high Reynolds numbers were designed and fabricated. The probes are smaller than existing probes and the electronics is faster in order to resolve the full range of scales present in high Reynolds number flows. This is of fundamental importance not only for academic research, but also for engineering applications (e.g. friction on aircraft) and turbulence modeling (e.g. wall functions that are still based on the Kármán constant).
Work Package 24: Quality assessment of data and models
This work package confronted the results obtained by facilities and numerical work. It provides means to control the quality of the data, of assessing the validity of the working hypotheses, and identifying the limits of our current understanding, and gives recommendations where further research is needed.
Work Package 25: Particles and Fields
This work package developed experimental methods extending the reach of Lagrangian techniques in EuHIT TNAs in order to improve possible connections with Eulerian methods and to address questions related to fundamental aspects of turbulence, mixing, turbulence-particles interactions, etc..
Potential Impact:
EuHIT has been a true success. During the course of EuHIT we had a total number of 14 calls, received 74 proposals, of which 69 were approved for funding, and 56 access experiments were successfully completed. The project leaders came from Belgium (1), Czech Republic (2), France (21), Germany (8), Hungary (1), Israel (3), Italy (1), Netherlands (4), Norway (2), Poland (2), Spain (5), Sweden (1), and United Kingdom (13). The EuHIT Project had four main directions of Dissemination Activities. The primary dissemination avenue was the web-portal, EuHIT.org. It is a visible and searchable entry-point to the project. One can reach it easily using all main search engines. In addition, the EuHIT consortium members have organized a set of dedicated events such as workshops, conferences and a summer school. Such events not only helped new users to know the project better and learn something about experiments in turbulence but also promoted face-to-face contact with Research Infrastructure’s staff. Yet another way of letting others know about the project was consortium member’s participation in workshops, conferences etc. This kind of dissemination increased the visibility of the project as well as awareness of EuHIT among some a-typical users. The last channel of dissemination was through peer-reviewed papers published in high-impact journals. As a result of these Dissemination Activities both the EuHIT project and the consortium have gained visibility and recognizably in the turbulence community and beyond. Collaborations with industry have been initiated and continuously intensified. Various contacts and cooperations exist with e.g. Dantec Dynamics (Skovlunde, Denmark), German Aerospace Center (Göttingen, Germany), LaVision (Göttingen, Germany), Vision Research (Wayne, USA), Innolas (Krailling, Germany).
Five Scientific Workshops were performed by the TNA facilities of EuHIT. Instead of having individual workshops at each facility, facilities with common orientations joined to perform workshops together to maximize the impact on the scientific community and to better reach potential users. This way the respective facilities could better announce their special features in comparison to the other competitive facilities.
The performed workshops were
• Wall Turbulence and Advanced Measurement Techniques (beneficiary CNRS), May 18-19, 2015
• EuHIT Cryogenic Turbulence Workshop (beneficiaries CERN, CUNI, CEA, ICTP), Oct. 26-29, 2015
• High-Reynolds Number Turbulent Flows (beneficiaries UNIBO, UNITO), Sep. 5-6, 2016
• Göttingen (beneficiary MPIDS), Feb. 14, 2017
• Ilmenau (beneficiary TUIL), Feb.15-16 2017
The EuHIT Summer School on Turbulence was a huge success. It provided comprehensive training for young, graduate and postgraduate researchers working in the broad area of turbulence science. The EuHIT School on Turbulence (4-6.07.2016) was combined with the EuroMech 8th European Postgraduate Fluid Dynamics Conference (6-9.07.2016). More than one hundred participants had a unique opportunity to attend excellent lectures and trainings at the School and to present and discuss results of their own work at the Conference. The school achieved its goal to educate the workforce of the future in the most modern turbulence research. EuHIT has published its results at many conferences and in high ranking journals. More details on the dissemination details can be found at the web portal EuHIT.org.
In summary, EuHIT increased the relevance of world-class turbulence research infrastructures across Europe and enabled groundbreaking research and innovation. EuHIT provided free access to the knowledgebase for turbulence data; ensured stable and higher quality service; provided knowledge support, optimal data use, download, and upload capabilities, and ensured an editorial process of the knowledge-base. EuHIT provided a networking structure fostering a culture of co-operation through science management, communication tools, dissemination of knowledge, good practice, training, human resource development and to provide harmonized and enhanced interfaces. EuHIT innovated in enabling technologies and thorough integration, partnered with industry in instrument development, and attracted some industry users to the research infrastructures and the turbulence database. EuHIT enabled the evaluation of data quality, innovated instrumentation for the joint use at the research infrastructures (also portable to general R&D), implemented controlled turbulence generation, developed a quality assessment for data and models, enabled instrumentation, and it opened new directions in turbulence research and applications.
List of Websites:
www.euhit.org
