Focus Session on Reconfiguration at APS/DFD in Boston (Nov. 22-24, 2015)

Dear colleagues,
We would like to bring to your attention the upcoming Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting of the American Physical Society in Boston, MA (Nov. 22-24, 2015). We are pleased to announce that we are organizing a Focus Session on Reconfiguration. We thus invite you to submit an abstract and come present your work in Boston.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Saturday, August 1st, 2015 5:00 p.m. EST. Abstracts can be submitted online at
http://abstracts.aps.org/
When submitting, you should select the appropriate sorting category:
40. Focus Session - Reconfiguration.

More information on the conference can be found on the website:
https://apsdfd2015.mit.edu/

Best regards,

Frederick Gosselin (Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal)
Heidi Nepf (MIT)
Emmanuel de Langre (Ecole Polytechnique, France)

Focus Session on Reconfiguration

Reconfiguration is the passive deformation of sessile organisms subjected to fluid flow. It confers an advantage to the organism in terms of minimised drag and fluid loading in comparison to an equivalent rigid structure. Trees bending under the wind, giant kelp blades aligning together under tidal flows, sea grass subjected to
wave action, or sea fans swaying with the waves are only a few examples of reconfiguration. The study of reconfiguration is of fundamental interest in biology to understand how sessile organisms adapt to their environment. It is also critical to better predict and avoid wind damages to crops, culture forests and urban trees during
storms. The interaction between vegetation and water flow is important in hydrology as it affects the flow resistance in vegetated channels.

The proposed session focuses on all aspects of reconfiguration including, but not limited to, drag and loading, Vogel exponents, elastic and brittle (pruning) deformations, static and dynamic behaviors, stability, and it includes both wind and water flows. The session scope includes the study of real biological organisms as well as idealised simplified structures such as fibers, beams, rods, membranes, plates or other bioinspired models which deform passively under fluid flow. The goal of this fluid-structure interaction session is to bring together researchers from different horizons of basic and applied sciences to exchange on their different approaches to the problem of reconfiguration.