Dr D Lucas
No more applications being accepted
Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
A major challenge in the field of fluid mechanics exists in understanding the complex nonlinear behaviour of turbulence. This problem has an enormous number of engineering and geophysical applications. Recently this spatiotemporal chaos has begun to be unravelled by considering the turbulent trajectory from a dynamical systems perspective as fleetingly visiting the neighbourhoods of unstable exact solutions, for example, fixed points, travelling waves and periodic orbits. These solutions have great value as reduced descriptions of the complex turbulent attractor. However significant challenges exist in efficiently locating and converging upon such solutions. A further challenge is in computing them in sufficient abundance and at high enough Reynolds numbers to associate with them exchanges of energy across spatial scales. This project aims to address this problem using several new techniques and makes use of the latest numerical methods including using GPU acceleration. The successful candidate will learn the current state-of-the-art method (so-called “recurrent-flow analysis”), extend it and finally apply these new methods to new systems, ultimately broadening the parameter regimes for which these techniques are practical.
Further information including references can be found at www.scm.keele.ac.uk/staff/d_lucas/
PhD available from September 2018.
Please quote FNS 2017-21 on your application.
Funding Notes
100% UK/EU tuition fees for 3 years commencing Academic year 2018/2019. Stipend support for three years at Research Council rates (2017/8 stipend £14,553 per annum). Some support for conference attendance will be available.
Source of funding: Faculty of Natural Sciences, Keele University
Eligibility Criteria:
Minimum of BSc (2:1 or higher) in applied mathematics or equivalent discipline, with strong preference for candidates with experience of computational modelling and/or fluid mechanics.