Wim M. van Rees received a FY2020 Department of Energy Early Career Award for his proposal entitled “A Multiresolution Sharp-interface Framework for Tightly-coupled Multiphysics Simulations“. Thanks to everyone who contributed in the lead-in to this project! This award will enable us to continue pushing the frontiers in computational science.

The public abstract for this project is below (from here):
An important subset of energy-related systems in fluid mechanics, geophysics, and industrial applications can be modeled as interface-coupled multiphysics problems. For these problems, the accurate prediction of system properties near moving boundaries and interfaces is a valuable capability that enables optimization of sensor placements, analysis of structural loadings, and many other insights. Significant modeling and algorithmic challenges stem from the wide range and scale separations of time and space in each domain, the large motions and deformations of the interface separating the domains, and the coupling between the different domains across such moving interfaces. This proposal aims to overcome these challenges by combining a high-fidelity treatment of sharp moving interfaces with a localized tight coupling strategy. The research from this novel paradigm will be implemented within a scalable multiresolution software framework. Testing and validation will be carried out on two representative applications: two-phase incompressible flows and fluid-structure interactions.