The Ph.D. in Scientific Computing program is intended for students who will make extensive use of large-scale computation, computational methods, or algorithms for advanced computer architectures in their doctoral studies. This seminar series showcases the breadth of research covered by the program. 

Featured Speaker:

Alex Hrabski, PhD Candidate, Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering and Scientific Computing

Alex is a PhD candidate in the department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, working in Yulin Pan’s Flow Physics and Engineering Lab to study nonlinear waves. His research seeks to leverage modern computational capabilities to explore wave turbulence theory and the physics that it seeks to describe.

Investigations of Wave Turbulence in Bounded Domains

Nonlinear wave systems are ubiquitous in nature, and when many incoherent dispersive waves interact, there is the potential for wave turbulence. Just as in hydrodynamic turbulence (HDT), systems in wave turbulence exhibit inter-scale energy cascades, power-law inertial-range spectra, and even intermittency. Unlike in HDT, however, a natural analytical closure for field statistics has been developed: spectral evolution in wave turbulence can be expressed as a Boltzmann-like kinetic equation. In this talk, we will numerically probe the interplay of nonlinear strength and domain size (critical quantities to the analytical closure) in determining the behaviors of wave turbulence in a model system. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that (a) domain aspect ratio plays a key role in spectral evolution when nonlinearity is weak, (b) that near-resonant interactions are important for the observation of kinetic behavior, and (c) evaluations of the energy cascade can be used to investigate the wave turbulence closure.

This event is part of MICDE’s seminar series featuring Ph.D. students in the Scientific Computing program. This series is open to all. University of Michigan faculty and students interested in computational and data sciences are encouraged to attend.

Questions? Email [email protected]