People
Research Fellow: Tom Verstraete
Dr. Verstraete’s research focuses on conjugate heat transfer and multidisciplinary optimisation. He has over 11 years of experience in the design of various turbomachinery components, ranging from axial/radial compressors/turbines, internal cooling channels to space propulsion inducers, nuclear pumps, and steam turbine diffusers. He has performed consulting for major turbomachinery industries in the field of space propulsion, automotive turbocharging, nuclear engineering and energy conversion. He has authored or co-authored over 90 journal papers, conference papers and contributions to books. His research interests comprise multidisciplinary shape optimisation, conjugate heat transfer and micro gas turbines.
Project leader: Dr. Jens-Dominik Müller
Dr. Müller is the leading investigator of projects FlowHead, About Flow (FP7 MSCA-ITN) and IODA (H2020 MSCA-ITN), which all relate to the efficient application of adjoint methods in aerodynamic design problems. The focus of his research group is on the application of automatic differentiation techniques to all solution components to achieve efficient, effective and robust optimisation workflows. This includes, among others, fully-differentiated and automatic CAD-based and CAD-free parametrisations, robust adjoint solvers and efficient simultaneous iteration loops.
Advisor: Dr. Marcus Meyer
Dr. Meyer is member of the CFD Methods group at RRD and has more than 14 years of experience in numerical methods for optimisation and uncertainty quantification and their application in different engineering disciplines and is involved in several nationally funded and EU projects.
Supervisor: Prof. Vassili Toropov
Prof. Toropov is the Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Director of Centre for Simulation and Applied Mechanics at QMUL. He has over 38 years of experience in design optimisation problems for large-scale problems with computationally expensive and noisy function values. He has developed a myriad of methods that find application in different engineering systems, e.g. aerospace, automotive, turbomachinery.