Introduction:
| |
Interest in determining and predicting transport barriers has exploded in the past few years, driven by environmental disasters (the Gulf oil spill) and biotechnological applications (controlling mixing at the micro-scale). The unsteady and finite-time nature of realistic flows has required new theoretical and computational methods for describing such barriers, for which a universally accepted definition remains elusive. Establishing connections between the diverse methods currently in usage, and evaluating their accuracy, is an ongoing endeavour. This special session brings together researchers advocating for a varied range of tools, and who offer theoretical, computational, experimental and observational perspectives to the issue. |
|