Prof. em. Dr. Leonhard Kleiser

Leonhard Kleiser has been full Professor of Fluid Mechanics at the Institute of Fluid Dynamics of ETH Zurich since September 1994.

He was born 1949 in Freiburg (Germany) and studied mathematics and physics at the University of Freiburg. Thereafter he worked as a scientific staff member at the Karlsruhe Research Center on the development of numerical methods and flow simulations. In 1982 he received his doctorate (Dr.-Ing.) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe (TH) and moved to the German Aerospace Research Establishment (DLR) in Göttingen, where he took responsibility for the research group "Transition and Turbulence" at the Institute for Theoretical Fluid Mechanics until his appointment to ETH Zurich.

His main research interests are in the fundamentals of fluid dynamics. Currently transitional, turbulent and particle-laden multiphase flows, biomedical flows and the origin of aeroacoustic noise are investigated in his group by numerical simulations on supercomputers. Simultaneously, new accurate and efficient simulation methods are developed. In Direct Numerical Simulations, the basic conservation equations are solved without modelling assumptions, resolving all details of a turbulent flow in space and time at corresponding enormous computational expense. By contrast, Large-Eddy Simulations are orders of magnitude more efficient but require modelling of non-resolved subgrid scales. In this area considerable progress has been achieved recently by novel modelling concepts. Such advances will lead to an improved quality of practical flow computations in the future.

Prof. Kleiser spent research visits at UC Santa Barbara, Caltech and the University of Uppsala. He is serving the community by participating in the editorial work of scientific journals, the organization of international conferences and in national and international organizations and committees. For his pioneering contributions to the development of accurate numerical methods for computational fluid dynamics and for their application to elucidate fundamental flow phenomena he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).