Topics & Projects
The professorships of the Department of Engineering Physics and Computation conduct research on a wide variety of physical principles. On this page they present a selection of special research topics from the department. Further research projects are presented by the professorships on their websites.
The Chair of Automatic Control is working on novel concepts for trajectory planning and control of autonomous racing vehicles with a special focus on interaction awareness. In cooperation with the Institute of Automotive Technology, the overall software is developed and tested both simulatively and experimentally. In the racing series "Indy Autonomous Challenge" and "Autonomous Challenge@CES", overtaking maneuvers with speeds of up to 266 km/h have already been successfully performed.
more about motion planning for autonomous driving and safe and robust predictive control for autonomous driving
Conventional methods such as the finite element method (FEM) for solid mechanics and fluid dynamics face natural restrictions at sharp edges and when cracks and very large deformations occur. Particle methods such as Peridynamics (PD) and related approaches are meshfree methods and do not have such limitations. One prime application is Additive Manufacturing (Selective Laser Melting), where a unified approach for thermodynamics, solid mechanics and crystal grain growth and transformation can be utilized. more about the research of the Mechanics & High Performance Computing Group
A patient-specific computational model of the cardiovascular mechanics represents a powerful tool for describing and understanding the heart function and diseases as well as predicting the effect of medical procedures. The developed 3D-0D coupled closed-loop model of the heart and the vascular system delivers valuable quantities of interest for the physicians, such as blood pressure, blood flow and the contraction of the heart muscle. Two research projects are being currently undertaken in collaboration with the German Heart Center Munich and AdjuCor GmbH. more about the research of the Mechanics & High Performance Computing Group
During laser synthesis and processing colloids, nanoparticles emerge from an ablated target surface. As a side effect, a cavitation bubble is generated in the ablation process that influences productivity and purity of the ablated material. The main goal of this project is to analyze the dynamics and interaction of spatially distributed cavitation bubbles on the nanoparticle formation with numerical simulations. more about the research group Nanoshock
Video: Professorship of Thermo-Fluid Dynamics
Clean gas turbines are part of energy transition as load-following power plants. Reducing pollutant emissions is achieved by burning leaner gas mixture, or replacing hydrocarbons by hydrogen fuel. However, in doing so, unstable physical mechanisms counteract the reduction in emissions and may also lead to structural failure of the turbine. We are tackling this challenge at the Professorship for Thermo-Fluid Dynamics using the Linearized Reactive Flow model, in collaboration with TU Berlin and the ReACH project (EuroTech) at Ecole Polytechnique, France.
The project is developing novel techniques to advance the state-of-the-art molecular simulations with respect to prediction fidelity and computational efficiency. To this end, the project employs the multi-body potentials and surrogate models, parametrized by deep learning architectures. more about the project