Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) has a vacancy in the research group on Multiscale Dynamics for
a PhD student for computational modelling of “Green Sparks”.
Job description Electric gas discharges occur in nature, most prominently in air in the form of lightning and its less visible precursors. Similar discharges occur in high-voltage equipment, such as the switchgear used in electric grids. Our transition to sustainable electric energy requires major extensions of this grid. However, switchgear and other high-voltage equipment currently often operate with SF6 gas, which is the worst greenhouse gas known. Within the project, we will investigate the dynamics of “green sparks” in “green” alternatives to SF6.
The fundamental question of the project is: How does the development of a gas discharge depend on the gas composition and on the operating conditions? We now are making a lot of progress on discharges in air, but air seems to be a very non-generic gas. Within the “Green Sparks” project, discharge experiments in different “green” gases will be performed by two PhD students at the departments of applied physics and electrical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, while the PhD student at CWI will focus on computational modelling. A committee of industrial users ranging from a start-up to a multinational will give feedback on the research twice per year.
Will you join our collaborative project team to develop and evaluate computational models for these discharges?
Then you would become part of our modelling group at CWI Amsterdam. Here we have extensive expertise in modelling the dynamics of such gas discharges. We work with particle or density models for the free electrons in the discharge and employ adaptive mesh refinement as well as analytical approximations to grasp the multiple spatial and temporal scales of the problem. For further background information on the project, see, e.g.,
https://homepages.cwi.nl/~ebert/2023-ERCIM-News.pdf or
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6595/abaa05 .