Dr Dominik Jens

Biography

Jens' research focuses on development and application of sensitivity methods in CFD. His group develops adjoint CFD solvers and shape parametrisation methods using automatic differentiation software tools, work that is funded among others by EU grants such as FlowHead , About Flow and most recently IODA. These adjoint solvers allow to calculate sensitivities of a cost function with respect to an arbitrarily large number of design variables at near constant computational cost. It is this property that allows to develop novel and effective design optimisation methods that can be integrated into the industrial design chain while giving complete flexibility of what to optimise for and allowing the use of automatic parameterisation methods which typically result in very large numbers of design variables. The group has developed a number of design parametrisation methods, in particular a unique CAD-based method which allows to maintain the CAD description of the shape inside the automated design loop. The approach avoids the need to develop a separate parametrisation to describe the degrees of freedom of the design, but that can import the boundary representation from CAD and produce the optimal shape in CAD format. The figures below show the Volkswagen S-Bend case optimised with CAD-based shape parametrisation. The pressure drop in the bend improves by 25% as demonstrated by the clean streamlines in the optimised case (right). The CAD-based parametrisation allows significant distortion of the shape but maintains smoothness.

Research Interest

Computational Fluid Dynamics, Fluid-Structure Interaction, Biofluids, Shape Optimisation, Adjoint methods, Mesh adaptation