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Mathematics Group

Current Research

New Materials Design

Working jointly with the Berkeley Lab EFRC (Energy Frontier Research Center), we are developing novel techniques to prune detailed zeolite databases for potential materials for carbon sequestration. Read More »

Granular Flow: Coal Hoppers and Pebble Bed Reactors

Together with Sandia National Lab, we have built large-scale simulations of an experimental pebble-bed nuclear reactor design, featuring 440,000 6 cm spherical particles that are slowly cycled through a cylindrical container, to analyze particle mixing between fuel and moderator Read More »

High-Throughput Data Extraction from the DOE Advanced Light Source

We have built fast, automatic algorithms to extract data from synchrotron light sources. These methods, which combine PDE-based image segmentation with statistical methods, assembled 2D data slices in 3D, and extract relevant structures. Read More »

Seismic imaging: Reconstruction of the earth from surface recordings

We have been able to build fast and robust algorithms to (i) convert time migrated coordinates to depth coordinates and (ii) convert migration velocities to depth velocities. These algorithms allowed imaging of subsurface substructures 3.3 km deep in a North Sea salt dome example with severe lateral variations. Read More »

Assimilating ocean and geophysics data

Our work on implicit sampling makes it possible to produce sample states that have a consistently high probability, reducing by a large factor the exploratory computing that needs to be done to eliminate unlikely possibilities. Read More »

Curved Meshing for Fixed and Deforming Boundaries Using Elasticity

We have applied our new methodology for building curved unstructured meshes on fixed and deforming boundaries, using an elasticity formulation, on a collection of coupled interacting fluid/solid body problems. These include meshing of moving wings in unmanned aerial vehicles. Read More »

Modeling of Industrial Printing and Nano-Jetting Spray Delivery

We built a computational environment to model two-phase microjetting in manufacturing and industrial devices. Read More »

Etching and Deposition in Semiconductor Process Manufacturing

We built a complete suite of mathematical and algorithmic tools to model etching and deposition in semiconductor manufacturing. Level set methods for interface motion are coupled to empirical flux laws, material-depending etch and deposition rates, re-emission profiles, and pattern masks. Read More »

Grain Boundaries and Stresses: Microchip Component Failure and Electromigration

We developed a continuum model of mass transport phenomena in microelectronic circuits due to high current densities (electromigration) and gradients in normal stress along grain boundaries. Read More »

Fluid Pinch-off and Sprays

We have built a new mathematical model applicable to a host of fluid breakage issues. Our new approach relies on embedding the interface, the velocity, and the potential in higher dimensional implicit forms, and then solving a coupled set of PDEs that naturally transition through fluid breakup Read More »