The recipients of the 38th François Naftali Frenkiel Award for Fluid Mechanics are Rodolfo Brandão and Ory Schnitzer for their paper “Spontaneous dynamics of two-dimensional Leidenfrost wheels,”,which was published in Physical Review Fluids 5, 091601(R) (2020). They were presented with this award on November 23, 2021 at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in Phoenix, Arizona. Each author received a check for $500 plus a scroll acknowledging the award. The Frenkiel Award citation reads: “The paper was selected for its insightful application of asymptotic methods and bifurcation theory to elucidate the transition to rolling in Leidenfrost droplets. The authors’ analysis contributes significantly to understanding this surprising symmetry breaking mechanism and predicts post-transition accelerations that agree qualitatively with recent experiments.”
The purpose of this Award, which is named after Dr. F. N. Frenkiel, is to recognize significant contributions in fluid mechanics by early career researchers. The Award is sponsored by the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics and, beginning with the 2017 award, has been given annually to an early career author of a paper that has been published in Physical Review Fluids, during the calendar year preceding the presentation. “Early career” is defined as having had not more than twelve years of full-time employment after the most advanced academic degree was awarded prior to the year of the paper’s publication, with a Ph.D. being the most advanced degree considered. More than one author may be involved, and one author may be a thesis advisor sharing the Award if the advisor also meets the same twelve year requirement. The winner of this Award is selected by a committee appointed by the Chair of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics.
François Naftali Frenkiel was born in Warsaw, Poland on September 19, 1910, and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Lille in France, where he studied under the direction of Kampé de Fériet. He came to the U.S. in 1947 and was associated successively with Cornell University, the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and, from 1960 until his retirement, with the David W. Taylor Naval Ship Research and Development Center. In addition to being the founder and longtime editor of Physics of Fluids, he served on a large number of national and international committees, including the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, of which he was the chairman and secretary on numerous occasions. He published extensively in the field of turbulent flows and pioneered the application of high-speed digital computing methods to the measurement of turbulence and the mathematical modeling of urban pollution. Dr. Frenkiel retired in 1981 and passed away on July 9, 1986, in Washington, DC.
Rodolfo Brandão is a Ph.D. student in Mathematics at Imperial College London. Prior to that, he did his undergraduate and masters studies in physics at the Federal University of Pernambuco. His previous and current research interests include the dynamics of droplets, wave propagation, asymptotic analysis, and flow in porous media.
Ory Schnitzer is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Imperial College London. He has been at Imperial since 2014, following a Ph.D. at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, on the topic of nonlinear electrokinetic phenomena. His interests are in fluid dynamics, wave phenomena, and asymptotic analysis.
Eric Lauga
Beverley McKeon
Editors
Published 20 January 2022
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.010001
