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September 19, 2022: Frederic Gibou, UCSB, 4:00 p.m. in 100 McBryde Hall "High Resolution Level-Set Methods in Fluids and Materials"

  • 4:00 p.m.
  • 100 McBryde Hall 
  • Frederic Gibou, University of California Santa Barbara
  • Faculty Host: Dr. Olivier Coutier-Delgosha

Abstract: Free boundary problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering but their numerical solutions are challenged by the fact that (1) smaller scales influence larger one in a non-trivial manner, which demands efficient adaptive gridding; (2) boundary conditions, including sharp jump conditions, must be imposed on a moving and irregular boundary and (3) nonlinearity requires advanced numerical schemes. I will present a framework that seeks to address these challenges and I will present some of their applications in the field of fluids and materials.

Bio: Professor Gibou is a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in the Department of Computer Science and in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also a core faculty member in the Computational Science and Engineering program. He received his PhD from the Applied Mathematics Department at UCLA, and did his post-doctoral research in the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science at Stanford University. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Mathematics, the Regent's Junior Faculty Fellowship, an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Robert Sorgenfrey Distinguished Teaching award. Professor Gibou is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Computational Physics and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Scientific Computing.

The research of Professor Gibou is at the interface between Applied Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering Sciences. It is focused on the design of a novel paradigm for high resolution computational methods for large scale computations and their use for a variety of applications including Computational Materials Science, Computational Fluid Dynamics and Computational Biology. The main commonality in these applications is that they are described by complex/free boundaries and similar classes of nonlinear partial differential equations. In addition, the multiscale nature of most interesting phenomena in the physical and life sciences motivate the development and use of versatile computational strategies on spatially adaptive grids and on massively parallel environments.

Professor Gibou leads a multidisciplinary research group, named Computational Applied Science Laboratory (CASL). Strong collaborations exist between CASL and other research groups at UCSB and worldwide, especially with experimentalists.