Congratulations to Yanni Lai for successfully defending her thesis, Multigrid Methods for the Bidomain Equations! Yanni is now finishing up some final revisions to her written thesis as the last step before completing her PhD requirements.

We are trilled to announce that we just received notification of a new $1.3M award through the NSF Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation program. This project will develop multiphase and low Mach number flow simulation capabilities in the IBAMR software and will re-engineer IBAMR to scale to 1000’s of cores and beyond. These capabilities will enable specific applications, including biological applications along with wave-energy converter devices and additive manufacturing (3D printing).

This is a collaborative project that will be carried out with teams of researchers at Northwestern University (PI: Neelesh Patankar), San Diego State University (PI: Amneet Bhalla), and University at Buffalo (PI: Matt Knepley).

Amin Kolahdouz’s paper, An immersed interface method for discrete surfaces, has been accepted to appear in the Journal of Computational Physics. (A preprint is available on the arXiv.) This paper develops an extension of the immersed interface method (IIM) that is specialized to discrete surface representations, such as triangulated surfaces. It also establishes through extensive numerical examples that IIMs that use only the lowest-order jump conditions (for the pressure and viscous shear stress) at immersed interfaces are able to yield global second-order convergence rates.

Congratulations, Amin!

Congratulations to Aaron Barrett for successfully defending his thesis, An Adaptive Viscoelastic Fluid Solver: Formulation, Verification, and Applications to Fluid-Structure Interaction! Aaron is off to a postdoctoral position at the University of Utah in July.

Congratulations to Mike Lee, who successfully completed his oral qualifying exam on fluid-structure interaction models of bioprosthetic heart valves and in vitro validation of computational models of cardiovascular fluid dynamics!

Charles’ paper, A sharp interface method for an immersed viscoelastic solid, is now available on the arXiv. This paper develops an extension of the hyperelastic immersed boundary method that sharply resolves pressure discontinuities at fluid-structure interfaces by modifying the definition of the elastic stress tensor associated with the hyperelastic material response. Unlike most other sharp-interface immersed boundary methods, however, this approach allows us to use standard discretization methods that are “oblivious” to the presence of the pressure discontinuity. Numerical tests show the impact of the method on the accuracy of the overall scheme, and an approach is developed that allows us to compute the splitting efficiently.

Amin’s paper, An immersed interface method for faceted surfaces, is now available on the arXiv. This paper develops an extension of the immersed interface method (IIM) that is specialized to faceted surfaces (arising, for instance, from finite element structural models). It also establishes through extensive numerical examples that IIMs that use only the lowest-order jump conditions (for the pressure and viscous shear stress) at immersed interfaces are able to yield global second-order convergence rates.

We expect to have one or more postdoctoral openings with start dates in 2019. For more details, see the Positions page of this site.