A stroll down Kármán street

The Kármán vortex street is an exquisite flow pattern that can be seen in a variety of flow situations. In this article, we present some of the main features of the phenomenon starting from its interesting history, and also show why it is important in a number of engineering situations. Raghuraman N Govardhan is in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Science. He works in the areas of separated flow, fluid-structure interaction and micro-flows. O N Ramesh is at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His research interests include transitional and turbulent flows, vortex dynamics and separated flows.