DoctorCraig McConnochie

I'm interested in environmental fluid mechanics - in particular, buoyancy driven flows and heat transfer.

My work has mainly focused on improving our understanding of the melting of ice shelves and icebergs around Antarctica and Greenland. Understanding the small scale processes that govern the melt rate can help us predict how these ice sheets will respond to a warming climate over coming decades.

Some other problems that I have worked on or am interested in are:
Mixing into sediment laden plumes, such as volcanic eruptions or smokestack discharges, to understand how quickly they will dilute and where the flow will go.
The small scale processes that control turbulent mixing in a variety of fluid flows, particularly in a density stratified environment where fluid can mix both into and out of a flow.
Low energy (or no energy) ventilation of buildings to reduce energy consumption.

To understand these problems I use idealized laboratory experiments and simple models. Laboratory experiments are able to include all of the important physical processes while still being controllable and repeatable. They are a wonderful tool for understanding fluid dynamics that can also produce beautiful imagery.