Biographical and Bibliographic Information

Peter J. Schmid
Associate Professor

Professor Schmid completed his undergraduate work at the Technical University Munich in 1986 and received an Engineer's degree in the field of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1989. He continued on to receive his doctorate in Mathematics in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining the University of Washington. His teaching interests include ordinary and partial differential equations, numerical methods and integral equations.

Professor Schmid's research interests focus on computational fluid dynamics with emphasis on hydrodynamic stability and the transition from laminar to turbulent fluid flow. Currently, he is working on the transient short-time development of disturbances in a variety of flow situations such as plane bounded shear flows, pipe flow, and vortical and granular flows. Other interests include the design of preconditioners for the compressible Euler equations, the breakdown of coherent structures in fully developed turbulence and the micro-fluid-dynamical interaction of spherical particles which aims at improving the constitutive relations for particulate media.

In his spare time, Professor Schmid enjoys skiing, sailing, and music. The following is a selection of some of his recent publications.

Stability and Transition in Shear Flows with D.S. Henningson, Springer Verlag, 2001

Linear stability theory and bypass transition in shear flows, Phys. Plasmas 7: pp. 1788-1794, 2000

Spectra and pseudospectra for pipe Poiseuille flow, with A.E. Trefethen, L.N. Trefethen, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 1926: pp. 413-420, 1999

Energy amplification of steady disturbances in growing boundary layers. In: Advances in Turbulence VII, ed.: U. Frisch, 1998

On stability of streamwise streaks and transition thresholds in plane channel flows, with S.C. Reddy, J. Baggett, D.S. Henningson, J. Fluid Mech. 365: 269-303, 1998

The importance of eigenvectors for local preconditioners of the Euler equations, with D. Darmofal, J. Comp. Phys. 127: 346-362, 1997

On transition thresholds in wall-bounded shear flows, with D.S. Henningson, S.C. Reddy, In: Advances in Turbulence VI, eds.: S. Gavrilakis, L. Machiels, P.A. Monkewitz, 1996

Transient growth in compressible boundary layer flow, with A. Hanifi, D.S. Henningson, Phys. Fluids 8: pp. 826-837, 1996

Receptivity of unbounded granular shear flow to periodic external forces, with H.K. Kytömaa, In: Proceedings of the Engineering Mechanics Conference, Boulder/CO, ed: Stein Sture, 1995

A note on measures of disturbance size for spatially evolving flows, with D.S. Henningson, Phys. Fluids A 6: pp. 2862-2864, 1994

The pseudospectrum of the resistive magnetohydrodynamics operator: resolving the resistive Alfven paradox, with D. Borba, K.S. Riedel, W. Kerner, G.T.A. Huysmans, M. Ottaviani, Phys. Plasmas 1: pp. 3151-3160, 1994

Transient and asymptotic stability of granular shear flow, with H.K. Kytömaa, J. Fluid Mech., 264: pp. 255-275, 1994

Optimal energy density growth in Hagen-Poiseuille flow, with D.S. Henningson, J. Fluid Mech. 277: pp. 197-225, 1994

A study of eigenvalue sensitivity for hydrodynamic stability operators, with D.S. Henningson, M.R. Khorrami, M.R. Malik, Theor. Comp. Fluid Dyn. 4: pp. 227-240, 1993

Eigenmode decomposition of the turbulent shear layer above a square rib, with M. Manhardt, H. Wengle, H. Werner, Appl. Scientific Research 51: pp. 359 - 364, 1993

Pseudospectra of the Orr-Sommerfeld operator, with S.C. Reddy and D.S. Henningson, SIAM J. Appl. Math., 53: 1, pp. 15-45, 1993

On the collision of rigid spheres in a weakly compressible fluid, with H.K. Kytömaa, Phys. Fluids A, 4: 12, pp. 2683-2689, 1992

A new mechanism for rapid transition involving a pair of oblique waves, with D.S. Henningson, Phys. Fluids A, 4: 9, pp. 1986-1989, 1992

Vector eigenfunction expansions for plane channel flows, with D.S. Henningson, Stud. in Appl. Math., 87: pp. 15-43, 1992

Back to my homepage