We offer assistant (HiWi) jobs, projects as well as bachelor and master theses.

Consider a spacecraft entering from outer space into the earth's atmosphere. Due to the friction of the rarefied gas with the vehicle, the gas becomes partially ionized and a plasma forms. The evolution of this ionized gas can be described with the Boltzmann Equation. Due to the high dimensionality of this equation its numerical solution is computationally very expensive.

We consider a special class of spectral methods to numerically approximate the solution of the Boltzmann Equation in a more efficient way. One well-known method is the moment method equipped with the Maximum Entropy closure. This system is symmetric hyperbolic and has thus great mathematical properties. Its numerical solution is unfortunately quite difficult to compute. In this project we want to use novel numerical methods, together with the computional power of GPU's to numerically solve the Maximum Entropy problem in a more efficient way.

Requirements: You should be proficient in C++ and interested in GPU programming. Knowledge of Finite Volume schemes for hyperbolic PDEs is a plus.

We offer a research HiWi-position for this project.

Contact: Roman Pascal Schärer