PhD-Position in Fluid Mechanics

PhD-Position in Fluid Mechanics Related to Kiln Aerodynamics and Porous Media Flow

The Division of Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Applied Physics and Mechanical Engineering, Luleå University of Technology is offering four PhD-positions in Fluid Mechanics related to Kiln aerodynamics and Porous media flow. The students will work in an exiting and growing environment using the latest techniques within the area of fluid mechanics and with the possibility to develop contacts world-wide within as well industry as academy. The division is putting great effort on the working environment and to improve the research education. The division has furthermore a fairly good gender balance and in order to keep this we encourage females as well as males to apply. All positions will also imply that contacts are taken world-wide through, for instance, meetings, conferences and longer stays abroad.


Qualifications

The PhD candidates should have 240 credits of which 60 credits on an advanced level within Mechanical engineering, Applied physics, Civil engineering or equivalent. The candidates should also be excellent in written and oral communication in Swedish or in English. Knowledge about CFD and/or advanced measuring techniques such as LDV or PIV is a merit as well as a high quality and relevant student diploma work. Knowledge of the Swedish language can also be of importance since part of the work will be carried out in close co-operation with industry. A short description of each project will now follow.

Fundamentals of Flow through Porous Media (Ref. no. 186-09)

Fluid flow through porous media takes place in a large amount of natural processes such as ground water flows, capillary flows in plants and flow in human organs and muscles. It is also of outmost importance to have knowledge of this flow in a number of industrial processes such as paper making, making of fibre boards, composites manufacturing, filtering, forming and sintering of iron ore pellets and drying and impregnation of wood. Despite the significance of porous media flow and the vast amount of work that has been performed to investigate it, knowledge about some fundamentals is missing. To start with the usage of different definitions of Reynolds number will be scrutinized and new methodologies or numerical and experimental studies of flow fields in model geometries will be developed. This will serve as a sound base for further studies regarding the mechanisms behind convective heat transfer in low Reynolds number porous media flow and flow in porous media with double scale porosity possible including filtration effects and wetting dynamics. The research will be carried out through usage of analytical modelling, Computational Fluid Dynamics and experimental techniques such as micro-PIV. The project is financed by The Swedish Research Council.