HRS2022/243 Researcher (PhD) - Doctor junior (R2)

The computational fluid mechanics group at the Aerospace engineering school of the UPM, is looking for a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Caust ERC advanced grant (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101018287 ) , which centres on exploring the role of simulations of turbulent flows in the limit of ‘zero’ computing cost (mostly on GPUs), and on the analysis of the resulting data. What ‘free’ simulations allow is ‘Monte-Carlo’ research, in which ideas are ‘randomly’ tested and only evaluated afterwards, in the hope that some of them be fruitful. Their main advantage is expected to be to alleviate ‘paradigm lock’, in which radically new ideas are unlikely to get tested, and knowledge gets stuck in a local optimum. Ensembles of cheap simulations also provide causal information about what the effect of a particular ‘random’ initial condition is. The main result in turbulence is expected to be the identification of novel flow structures, with definitions grounded in the underlying physical effect instead of, as is often the case, on properties assumed a-priori to be important (e.g. intensity). In particular, we will search for flow configurations that are ‘causally most sensitive’ to perturbations, in the sense that the perturbations are most effective when applied on them. Both the probing perturbations and the receptive flow states constitute ‘causes’. The flows examined will mainly be wall-bounded turbulent ones. The candidate job will be to convert all this into reality, including, most importantly, to think critically.