Scruton Lecture 2025: what did the wind tunnel ever do for us?

Overview

Alan Robins, emeritus professor of environmental fluid mechanics at the University of Surrey, will deliver this year’s Scruton Lecture.

In the late 1970s, it seemed that wind tunnel dispersion research was under-represented at major wind engineering conferences. A few of us working in this field thought that we should have our own events, so we held an inaugural meeting at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, Apeldoorn, in 1982. Eventually, this resulted in the biennial International Workshop on Physical Modelling of Flow and Dispersion Phenomena (Physmod conference series).

What we do has changed in many respects over the years, driven by competition from computational fluid dynamics and growing ambition. But how robust is our discipline today and what new topics might we address?

One certainty is that we must keep developing facilities that will continue to enable innovation. Another is that there are 24 hours in the day – and, given suitable investments in automation, these can all be used.

Enhancements at this level require substantial funding, but the benefits they offer will be substantial too, especially if our community can collaborate more closely to deliver them with greater efficiency.

The 2025 Scruton Lecture will explore these themes in depth and provide insights into future innovations in the field.