(39a) What Makes a Flow Interesting to Industrial and Academic Researchers?

A variety of motivations drive research in academia and industry,
but it's safe to say that activity often occurs in areas that are either funded, interesting, or novel.  While it's
usually clear when work is funded, interest and novelty in a given area is
often a matter of perspective that can vary significantly from industry to
academia.  Research topics with enormous economic impact in industry can
sometimes be ignored by academics because the topics seem trivial or the impact
of the work is not obvious. Industry often does a poor job communicating its
needs because of its short-term focus, its broad interests, and a lack of
experience working with academics.  In this talk I will draw on examples
of novel flows and industrial unanswered questions in the area of complex fluid
flows and contrast them with my perception of the current trends in the same
field for academia.  The intent is to communicate needs for the field that
may be unknown outside of industry, but also to suggest ways of better communicating
research motivations in both directions.