Vacancies

Ph.D. position: Numerical aspects of SPH

A PhD position is available at TU Eindhoven, starting date is before the summer of 2012. Topic of research is the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method. SPH is a numerical method that has been applied with great success in many fields in engineering and science. Since it is a gridless, particle based technique, it is especially suited for treating problems with free surfaces, multiphase flow, high velocity impact, crack propagation or large deformations.

SPH and its many variants show impressive simulation results in a variety of applications. There are however great challenges ahead:

• To achieve reliable and accurate solutions, the computational accuracy, consistency, stability and convergence need further study. Indeed, consistency is a topic of recent interest. Application of the traditional concept of consistency for grid-based methods (can a polynomial of degree n be approximated exactly?) leads to disappointing results for SPH: it can only recover polynomials of degree 1 in the interior and not even degree 0 (constants) near the boundary of the computational domain.
• The treatment of domain boundaries and imposing boundary conditions has triggered attention but has not been dealt with properly yet.
• Due to the particle nature of the method, it is not straightforward how to achieve different resolution in parts of the computational domain in an efficient way.
• It is currently unclear how to handle particles with varying supports.

The PhD research will address several of these issues.

For more information and applications, please contact Prof.Dr. W.H.A. Schilders, TU Eindhoven, e-mail: w.h.a.schilders@tue.nl.