Proceedings of the 10th IUTAM Symposium on Laminar-Turbulent Transition

Kentaro Kato is Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shinshu University. After studying mechanical engineering at Keio University, he undertook a PhD program at Technical University of Munich, Germany (2011-2014) under the Erasmus Mundus BEAM project, then earned his PhD in 2017 at Keio University. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, he has been working at his current position at Shinshu University since 2022. Based on systematic experiments on instabilities and transitions in three-dimensional boundary layers, especially those occurring on rotating bodies, he has proposed a new scaling of instabilities causing transition. From the analysis of quantitative data of the experiments, he is currently continuing his research on the relationship between statistics and eddy structure of the flow, the influence of curvature and rotation on instability and turbulent transition, as well as its physical interpretation.

Ayumu Inasawa is Associate Professor of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Faculty of System Design, Tokyo Metropolitan University. He received his Ph. D. in 2005 in mechanical engineering at Tohoku University and became a Research Associate at Tokyo Metropolitan University.  In 2013, he was promoted to Associate Professor. His research interests include flow instability, boundary-layer transition, aerodynamic sound, thermal fluid dynamics, and flow control. His present research topic is drag reduction by riblets aiming at actual implementation, natural transition in boundary layers, and experimental flow control using distributed surface heating. He has also developed an ultra-low-noise hot-wire anemometer with integrated probe and bridge circuit, for which he received an excellent application award from the Japan Society of Fluid Mechanics in 2020.

Masaharu Matsubara is Professor of Mechanical Systems Engineering at Shinshu University. He studied mechanical engineering at Keio University and received his Ph. D. in 1993. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden (1993-1996) and Tohoku University, Japan (1996-1998), and has been at Shinshu University since 2000. He has been working mainly on experimental studies of boundary-layer transition due to free-stream turbulence, for which he received a best-paper award from the Japan Society of Fluid Mechanics in 2005. His present research topic is the extraction of disturbances using linear response in turbulent shear flows, attempting to quantify the structure and growth of flapping modes in two-dimensional turbulent jets and near-wall streaks in turbulent boundary layers. He has also developed an experimental approach to determining the intermittency rate of transitional channel flows and the large-scale structures that appear therein.