Peter Bradshaw

Abstract Despite winning academic prizes throughout his undergraduate years at Cambridge, on graduation Peter Bradshaw declined to pursue doctoral research, joining instead the Aerodynamics Division of the National Physical Laboratory. There, he designed new wind tunnels, while his research focused on the flow immediately adjacent to the aircraft surface—the boundary layer—that was in turbulent motion. While principally an experimentalist, Peter believed that, to compute turbulent flows successfully, one must account for upstream effects of turbulent mixing rather than simply use local features of the mean-velocity and strain fields. This rationale he persuasively demonstrated at a major test of computational schemes for two-dimensional turbulent boundary layers. Peter moved to Imperial College in 1969, creating a world-leading group in experimental aerodynamics and probing further many of his earlier concepts, including the effects of three-dimensionality, pressure gradients, separation and compressibility. Recruited to Stanford University in 1988, he developed close links with the nearby NASA Ames Laboratory, being concerned, inter alia, with the decay of the vortices shed from wingtips. While rarely attending conferences, he was popular and had a very wide following among the turbulent flow community, making freely available his literature digest of more than 10 000 articles.