Faculty Profile

Leon van Dommelen, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1981 with Prof. Shan-Fu Shen. In his Ph.D. thesis, he discovered an important new property of flows of ordinary gasses and liquids around smooth bodies: the boundary layers that form at the surfaces of such bodies spontaneously break up by means of a process called 'unsteady boundary layer separation.' Before, there had been considerable doubt whether such a process would really occur in supposedly well-understood unsteady boundary layers. Most of Dr. Van Dommelen's research has been a similar mix of numerical and theoretical work on fundamental questions, such as boundary layer separation processes under varying conditions, unsteady rear stagnation point flow, aerodynamic forces on moving bodies, and the interactions between vortices, including improved computational methods for how they move and interchange vorticity. He was also the main developer of the departmental M.S.M.E. Online education program.

• Van Dommelen, L.L., Chandra, N. & Haik, Y. (1999) FAMU-FSU M.S.M.E. Online Program. 2000 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, June 18-21, 2000, St. Louis, MO.
• Shankar, S. & Van Dommelen, L. (1996). A New Diffusion Procedure for Vortex Methods. Journal of Computational Physics, 127, 88-109.
• Whitley, N., Van Dommelen, L. & Krothapalli, A. (1996). The influence of forward flight on thrust augmenting ejectors. Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics, 8, pp 37-55.
• Van Dommelen, L. L. & Rundensteiner, E. A. (1989) Fast solution of the two-dimensional Poisson equation with point-wise forcing. Journal of Computational Physics, 83, 126-147.
• Van Dommelen, L. L. & Shen, S. F. (1985) The flow at a rear stagnation point is eventually determined by exponentially small values of the velocity. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 157, 1-16.
• Van Dommelen, L. L. & Shen, S. F. (1980) The spontaneous generation of the singularity in a separating laminar boundary layer. Journal of Computational Physics, 38, 125-140.