Surging cylinders, flapping wings and gust encounters: Force production in unsteady flows

Professor Holger Babinsky

• 18:00 - 19:00 Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre Michaelmas Term

Unsteady effects occur in many natural and technical flows, for example around flapping wings or during aircraft gust encounters. If the unsteadiness is large, the resulting forces can be quite considerable. However, the exact physical mechanisms underlying the generation of unsteady forces are complex and their accurate prediction remains challenging. One strategy is to identify the dominant effects and describe these with simple analytical models, first proposed a hundred years ago. When used successfully, this approach has the advantage that it also gives us a conceptual understanding of unsteady fluid mechanics.  

In this lecture I will explain some of these ideas and demonstrate how they can still be useful today. As a practical example, I will show how the forces experienced in a wing-gust encounter can be predicted – and how the predictions can be used to mitigate the gust effects. The lecture will be illustrated with images and videos from simple, canonical, experiments.
 

Pain: Why does it exist, how does it work and how can we more effectively treat it?

Professor Ewan St. John Smith - A V Hill Lecture

• 18:00 - 19:00 Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre Michaelmas Term

The sensation of pain is one which nearly everyone is familiar with, usually being considered an unpleasant experience. Wouldn’t a life without pain be better? Drawing on human genetics and the wider animal kingdom, we shall see that there are in fact benefits to pain, or rather nociception, the neural process encoding noxious stimuli. Pain is not however static. For example, following an accident, the injured part of the body becomes more sensitive, a phenomenon that usually resolves as the injury heals. Understanding the molecular processes by which pain functions and how the sensitivity in the system changes under different conditions is important for the development of novel therapeutics to treat the chronic pain, such as that associated with osteoarthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, endometriosis, and a wealth of other conditions. Looking to potential new therapeutic avenues, we will discuss what can be learned from studying human genetics and extremophile organisms, such as the naked mole-rat, as well what the future holds regard gene- and cell-based therapy.