resume

Douglas Addy

PhD Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, UK (advisor: Serafim Kalliadasis and José Carrillo de la Plata); MRes Fluid Dynamics across Scales, Imperial College London, UK; BS in Aerospace Engineering, Technical University of Madrid (ETSIAE, UPM), Spain; BS in Mathematics (to be completed), UNED, Spain.

About

Following PhD Sergio joined Graphcore as AI Applications Engineer. Now, AI Solution Architect at NVIDIA. The information below was of relevance whilst a PhD student in the Complex Multiscale Systems group.

I obtained my PhD in the Complex Multiscale Systems group in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London, headed by Prof. Serafim Kalliadasis. I held a President's PhD Scholarship co-supervised by Professor José A. Carrillo. Prior to this, I completed a degree in Aerospace Engineering at Technical University of Madrid (ETSIAE, UPM) and a Master of Research in Fluid Dynamics across Scales at Imperial College London. Currently, I am finalising a degree in Mathematics at UNED, the Spanish Open University.

My current research interest is the understanding and application of numerical methods to study different aspects of fluid dynamics.

PhD project

Density Functional Theory and its dynamic extensions (DDFT) have become a widely-employed tool in the study of the microscopic structure of non-homogeneous fluids. The main advantage of DDFT over other approaches such as Molecular Dynamics relies on its lower computational cost, while it retains the microscopic details of the system. Significant progress has been accomplished both in numerical and theoretical aspects of DDFT by the Complex Multiscale Systems group at Imperial College London, led by Professor Serafim Kalliadasis.

In spite of the substantial contributions completed in the numerical techniques, more efforts are needed to adequately simulate multidimensional DDFT problems in reasonable times. The primal objective of this PhD is to explore new numerical methodologies that can successfully solve the DDFT governing equations in a variety of challenging configurations.

The Complex Multiscale Systems group has attained crucial results by means of pseudospectral methods in DDFT, which can be applied in simple geometries. This PhD will complement pseudospectral methods by means WENO and finite element schemes. On the one hand, WENO (weighted essentially non-oscillatory) schemes are clasiccally applied in hyperbolic conservation laws due to its high-order and non-oscillatory interpolation of piecewise smooth functions. On the other hand, finite element methods have proven to be specially suited for problems in confinement with non-trivial domains. The application of these two innovative techniques is expected to take the Complex Multiscale Systems group to the next level in terms of DDFT simulation.

Previous research

I have worked with Professor José A. Carrillo and Professor Young-Pil Choi in Lagrangian schemes for hydrodynamic equations of collective-behaviour models and WENO schemes for compressible Euler equations. This study was completed for my Bachelors thesis and was awarded with the UROP prize from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. The work has been published as chapter of the book: Active Particles - Volume 1. Springer (2017).

I also studied turbulent flows with solid particles in the group of Professor Berend van Wachem, co-supervised by Thomas Curran, analysing the connection between preferential concentration and turbulence modulation. This study was completed for my Master of Research thesis and a publication is being prepared.

Publications