CRD’s Pazner Wins First-Place in AIAA Aviation Forum’s Student Paper Competition

Will Pazner, a graduate student researcher in CRD’s Mathematics Group won first place in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) category of a student paper competition hosted by the 2017 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Aviation Forum, with his paper High-Order DNS and LES simulations Using an Implicit Tensor-Product Discontinuous Galerkin Method.

Although the conference was held June 2017 in Denver, Colorado, the student paper competition winners were only announced recently. As the first place winner, Pazner will receive $300 in cash.

“High-order methods such as the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) scheme are widely believed to become the standard tools for simulation of challenging problems in computational mechanics, such as turbulent flows and problems with multi-scale phenomena and non-linear coupled multiphysics. However, the computational cost of the linear algebra solvers typically employed scale very poorly with the polynomial degree p (to the ninth power), which means the potential for very high order accuracy is severely limited," says Per-Olof Persson, a researcher in CRD’s Mathematics Group, UC Berkeley Mathematics Professor and Pazner’s advisor.

In his award winning paper, Pazner describes his completely new approach for solving these systems, which is based on approximate preconditioning using a so-called Kronecker-SVD factorization. The resulting method scales as p^5 instead of p^9, and current work involves improving this to the optimal scaling p^4 for these methods.

“We expect these new techniques to impact many important areas, such as aero-acoustics problems and turbulent flow simulations using so-called Large Eddy Simulation,” adds Persson.

Pazner is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Brown University, and is an Exchange Scholar at UC Berkeley.