The Faculty of Engineering and Science, Department of Mathematical Sciences, would like to invite applicants for two three-year PhD stipends within the PhD programme Physics and Computational Science. Work location: Aalborg University Copenhagen. The employment will start on 1 June 2020 or soon thereafter.

Project description

The two PhD projects are part of the research project “Numerical Methods for Interfacial Flows (InterFlow)” sponsored by Independent Research Fund Denmark and by the department. The main aim of the InterFlow project is to develop accurate and efficient numerical methods improving our ability to simulate fluid flows involving complex fluid interfaces. Such simulations are used extensively in many areas of engineering e.g. to predict extreme loads from breaking waves on offshore wind turbines and in the analysis of bubbly flows in chemical processing plants.

Responsibilities and tasks

The two PhD’s will improve existing and develop new numerical algorithms for representing and advancing in time the fluid surface separating a gas and a liquid (e.g. air and water). Specifically, the PhD’s will work with so-called geometric Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) methods for propagating the fluid interface and with consistent coupling of VoF methods with the algorithms used to update the fluid pressure and velocity field in incompressible two-fluid flows. A few relevant references are:

J. Roenby, H. Bredmose, and H. Jasak, “A computational method for sharp interface advection,” Royal Society Open Science, vol. 3, no. 11, p. 160405, Nov. 2016, doi: 10.1098/rsos.160405.

V. Vukčević, J. Roenby, I. Gatin, and H. Jasak, “A Sharp Free Surface Finite Volume Method Applied to Gravity Wave Flows,” arXiv:1804.01130 , Apr. 2018.

The developed numerical methods will be implemented in OpenFOAM and released as open source code. OpenFOAM is a widely used open source CFD code library written in C++. The PhD’s will become part of and actively engage in the global open source community around the OpenFOAM code.

The PhD positions will involve active daily collaboration with the other research group members working on related numerical challenges, e.g. via journal clubs and collaborative organization of summer schools and workshops. The positions may also involve specific engineering applications of the developed numerical methods in collaboration with other departments and/or companies. Emphasis will be on areas of applications where our technology assists the green transition. The PhD positions will include some amount of teaching and/or teaching assistant work, mainly 1st year mathematics for engineering students. Teaching tasks may take place at any of the three AAU Campuses (Aalborg, Esbjerg, Copenhagen).

Deadline: 25 March 2020

More information can be found and applications can be submitted here: https://www.stillinger.aau.dk/vis-stilling/?vacancy=1088473