The existence and crucial role played by large-scale, organized motions in turbulent flows are now recognized by industrial, applied and fundamental researchers alike. It has become increasingly evident that coherent structures influence mixing, noise, vibration, heat transfer, drag, etc... The accelera tion of the development of both experimental and computational programs devoted to this topic has been evident at several recent international meet ings. One of the first questions which experimentalists or numerical analysts are faced with is: how can these structures be separated from the background turbulence? This is a nontrivial task because the coherent structures are gen erally embedded in a random field and the technique used to determine when and where certain structures are passing, or their averaged characteristics (in the more probable or dominant role sense) is directly related to the definition of the coherent structure. Several methods or approaches are available and the choice of a particular one is generally dependent on the desired informa tion. This choice depends not only on the definition of the structure, but also on the experimental and numerical capabilities available to the researcher.

This book is a unique opportunity to present in a single volume information that is needed for both experimentalists, theoreticians and computationalists for the detection, analysis, prediction and control of eddy structures in turbulent shear flows. Major identification techniques of Eddy Structures in Turbulent Shear Flows are presented together with applications to vortex dynamics, turbulence management and flow control, for experimental and numerical applications with new prediction methods: Eduction Schemes, Proper Orthogonal Decomposition, Stochastic Estimation, Pattern Recognition Analysis, Wavelet Transform. Illustrations of the use of the different methods are given.