The main steps taking the Lattice Boltzmann (LB) method beyond the realm of continuum hydrodynamics are discussed along with an appraisal of future prospects for coupling LB with other computational kinetic methods, such as Bird's Direct Simulation Monte Carlo and/or Discrete Velocity Models.

The RapidCell (RC) model was originally developed to simulate flagellar bacterial chemotaxis in environments with spatiotemporally varying chemoattractant gradients. RC is best suited for motility simulations in unbounded nonfluid environments; this limits its use in biomedical applications hinging on bacteria-fluid dynamics in microchannels. In this study, we eliminated this constraint by coupling the RC model with the colloidal lattice Boltzmann (LB) model.

In the current study, a direct-forcing immersed boundary-non-Newtonian lattice Boltzmann method (IB-NLBM) is developed to investigate the sedimentation and interaction of particles in shear-thinning and shear-thickening fluids. In the proposed IB-NLBM, the non-linear mechanics of non-Newtonian particulate flows is detected by combination of the most desirable features of immersed boundary and lattice Boltzmann methods.

We consider stochastic differential games with N nearly identical players, linear-Gaussian dynamics, and infinite horizon discounted quadratic cost. Admissible controls are feedbacks for which the system is ergodic. We first study the existence of affine Nash equilibria by means of an associated system of N Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman and N Kolmogorov-Fokker-Planck partial differential equations, proving that for small discount factors quadratic-Gaussian solutions exist and are unique.

Earth Observation (EO) mining systems aim at supporting efficient access and exploration of large volumes of image products. In this work, we address the problem of content-based image retrieval via example-based queries from Petabyte-scale EO data archives. To this end, we propose an interactive data mining system that relies on distributing unsupervised ingestion processes onto virtual machine instances in elastic, on-demand computing infrastructures that also support archive-scale content indexing via a "big data" analytics cluster-computing framework.

Results from direct numerical simulations (DNS) of particle relative dispersion in three-dimensional homogeneous and isotropic turbulence at Reynolds number Re?~300 are presented. We study point-like passive tracers and heavy particles, at Stokes number St=0.6,1 and 5. Particles are emitted from localised sources, in bunches of thousands, periodically in time, allowing an unprecedented statistical accuracy to be reached, with a total number of events for two-point observables of the order of 1011.

We present a numerical study of Rayleigh-Benard convection disturbed by a longitudinal wind. Our results show that under the action of the wind, the vertical heat flux through the cell initially decreases, due to the mechanism of plume sweeping, and then increases again when turbulent forced convection dominates over the buoyancy. As a result, the Nusselt number is a nonmonotonic function of the shear Reynolds number. We provide simple models that capture with good accuracy all the dynamical regimes observed.