of Columbia, and through 1976, more than 850 

 departmental grants were made, totaling $30,- 

 800,000, along with more than $20,000,000 in insti- 

 tutional contribution. This program has also been 

 responsible for aiding the development of new 

 types of instrumentation that have opened large 

 and exciting new areas of chemistry. 



Looking Ahead 



A most important unsolved problem in fluid 

 mechanics remains that of turbulence. Within this 

 area of research, large-scale coherent structure is 

 most important; that is, turbulence represented by 

 vortices whose characteristic length scales are of 

 the order of the characterizing length scales for the 

 flow generation. In spectral representation terms, 

 one refers here to the portion of the turbulent en- 

 ergy spectrum with wave-numbers less than the 

 wave-numbers normally associated with the peak 

 in the energy spectrum. 



In this range of wave-numbers, the turbulent 

 motion controls phenomena such as the diffusion 

 of momentum and the diffusion of scalar quantities 

 such as temperature. Vortex dynamics of these 

 length scales in turbulent flows is very poorly 

 understood; yet such knowledge is essential to the 

 understanding of diffusion processes especially 



under conditions where shear and stratification are 

 present. Development of new experimental tech- 

 niques and instrumentation have given new life to 

 this very old but little understood dynamical pro- 

 cess, and pursuit of research in this area will be 

 emphasized in coming years. 



Priorities in basic research are difficult, maybe 

 even dangerous, to attempt to establish, given the 

 unpredictable nature of future discoveries. About 

 the best that can be done is to identify areas of 

 emphasis based on the most promising research 

 directions presently perceived. These have for the 

 most part been dealt with in preceding sections, 

 but some additional promising areas are: Theory of 

 nonlinear waves; study of oscillating chemical re- 

 actions; study of electronic and structural proper- 

 ties of liquids; study of the transport and other 

 properties of systems with two or more material 

 phases; analysis of large, complex, manmade dy- 

 namic systems; study of relationships between 

 mechanical properties of materials and their chem- 

 istry and internal structure (e.g., crack propaga- 

 tion, stress corrosion, hydrogen embrittlement); 

 providing added computational capability for theo- 

 retical chemistry; increasing work on "intelligent 

 systems"; providing dedicated instrumentation for 

 computer research; and supporting fuller utiliza- 

 tion of existing elementary particle accelerators. 



RESEARCH APPLICATIONS DIRECTORATE 



RANN Mission 



The Research Applications Directorate (reorgan- 

 ized into "Directorate for Applied Science and 

 Research Applications," February 6, 1978) was 

 established in 1971 to bring the resources of sci- 

 ence and technology to bear on selected important 

 national problems. Its origin goes back to a 1968 

 congressional amendment to the 1950 charter of 

 the Foundation, an amendment specifically allow- 

 ing the support of "applied" research as well as 

 basic research. Establishment of the Directorate 

 came as a decisive step in an evolutionary process, 

 begun in 1968, for the introduction of work in re- 

 search applications as a clearly defined part of the 

 Foundation's research support activities. With its 

 establishment, the Directorate formulated the 

 phrase, "Research Applied to National Needs," to 

 emphasize the focus of its program and fostered 

 use of the acronym RANN to give the new under- 

 taking a ready identification. While its activities 

 look primarily to research applications, the Direc- 

 torate not unexpectedly finds need to support for 

 its program purposes a significant amount of basic 



21 6 NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 



research — an estimate based on fiscal 1977 put the 

 level at 35 to 40 percent of the RANN total— and 

 has summarized the reasons in this comment: 



Basic research is usually supported by RANN 

 when fundamental knowledge concerning specif- 

 ic phenomena is needed to reach the problem- 

 solving stage; thus, RANN programs usually 

 involve a mix of both basic and applied re- 

 search, which varies depending on the problem 

 area. 



In the following discussion of the Directorate, 

 research activities primarily applied in nature were 

 excluded from consideration. 



Examples of Basic Research 



Ten of the most significant projects involving 

 basic research carried out by the Research Appli- 

 cations Directorate are: 



Airborne contaminants. For several years, 

 RANN has supported research within its "Chemi- 



