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Lorena A. Barba
PhD Aeronautics, Caltech (2004)
For up-to-date contact information, please see my faculty profile.
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Research Interests
I am a computational scientist and a fluid dynamicist. That is, I do research by means of computer simulations, I study and develop numerical methods, and the types of applications I am most interested in have to do with problems of fluid flow.
One of the challenges in fluid simulation continues to be the need to straddle many scales. New research in computational methods is still sorely needed to build schemes that are intelligent, detect the scales of the problem, and adapt. Moreover, we need programs that are hardware-aware. A new-wave in computational fluid and solid mechanics is the development of meshfree methods. They promise to offer solutions to many enduring problems ...
The SCAT Project
SCAT stands for Scientific Computing Advanced Training, and it is a project co-financed by the ALFA Programme of the European Commission for collaboration with Latin America in science and technology. I put together a network of 10 institutions of higher education and research in Europe and Latin America, came up with the concept for this project, and wrote the proposal, which was successful at the 11th round of the programme, in October 2004. The project has brought together many scientists, organized international meetings and awarded mobility grants to graduate students and post-doctoral scholars in both continents.
Sample Research Topic
Emergence and evolution of vortex tripoles
When a strong vortex is subject to a perturbation, the first fundamental question that arises is whether it will return to an axisymmetric shape. In linear theory, it will. But when nonlinear effects are strong, structures like the tripole can emerge.