CCSS - activity groups

CCSS bündelt und verknüpft Arbeitsgruppen aus unterschiedlichen Fakultäten der Universität Duisburg-Essen. In so genannten activity groups sollen diese Cluster sich darstellen, ihre Arbeitsschwerpunkte definieren, ihre gemeinsamen Tätigkeiten kommunizieren und dabei sozusagen die Keimzellen wissenschaftlicher Zusammenarbeit im CCSS bilden. Im Gegenzug unterstützt CCSS seine activity groups administrativ und organisatorisch.

Folgende acitivity groups haben sich derzeit im CCSS gebildet:

  • Multiphase Flows
  • Computational Nanoscience
  • Society

Interessenten an diesen activity groups und deren Aktivitäten können sich jederzeit an die Geschäftsführung des CCSS wenden. Gleiches gilt für Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler, die an der Bildung einer neuen activity group interessiert sind.

Multiphase Flows

The activitiy group "Multiphase Flows" involves researchers from the departments of engineering, physics, chemistry and computer sciences. Their work focuses on the modeling and simulation the flow, the transport, and the chemical reactions in systems that involve solid, liquid and gaseous phases. Multiphase flows involve a severe multi-scale problem, which means that small features (like droplets, cavitation bubbles, or turbulent eddies) must be resolved over a large domain, resulting in a number of "features" that is too large even for the most powerful computers. The problem can be reduced by modeling approaches that trade some accuracy for significantly lower computational cost. The members of the activity group 'Multiphase Flows' develop, implement and test such models with the aim of achieving a better understanding of the physical process and to eventually design saver, more economic, and more sustainable flow devices.

The participating groups are headed by.

Computational Nanoscience

Structuring materials on the nanometer scale has created entirely new opportunities for creating devices with novel functions. These functions are based on the scale-dependent physical and chemical properties in the realm between individual molecules and macroscopic bodies, and become particularly apparent in nanoparticles. A thorough understanding of the properties and interactions of nanoparticles provides guidance for a systematic exploration of the largely uncharted world of nanomaterials.

The great progress in present-day experimental techniques provides an everincreasing amount of reliable yet dicult to interprete data. This progress is paralleled by a dramatic increase of computer power that is required for understanding these data and predicting new phenomena by means of simulation. Such analysis and simulation are referred to as Computational Nanoscience.

Computational Nanoscience is able to bridge the gap between the atomic and the device scale by simulation. We study the atomic and electronic properties of nanostructured materials (e.g. shape memory alloys and magnetic heterostructures), and their relation to the function of the device. We want to understand how precursor molecules react and ultimately form nanoparticles, how these particles interact, agglomerate, and how they can be stabilized. On the largest scale, we investigate transport processes such as thermoelectricity, spintronics, and charge and matter transport in nanostructured materials for energy conversion through statistical simulations.

The participating groups are headed by.

Society

Natural scientists, engineers and mathematicians become ever more interested in questions focusing on human beings and their various mutual interactions as well as their interactions with the environment. The reasons for this development are, first, the experiences accumulated in these sciences with complex systems and, second, the wealth of data on all kinds of social systems which became available during the last fifteen to twenty years.

These efforts are paralleled by a growing tendency in economics and other social sciences to strengthen quantitative research.

The common goal is then to quantitatively analyze and model various aspects of social life. Two topics are in the focus: In the area traffic, classical transport is to be investigated. Besides highway and city traffic, this includes the dynamics of pedestrians and also social insects. In the area economy and financial markets, the goal is to deeper understand and to quantitatively model economic processes of various kinds.

The above mentioned interactions in social systems are far too complicated to be directly traced back to the known elementary laws of physics. Furthermore, most of the systems in question are “large”, that is, they involve a larger number of degrees of freedom. This, however, implies that statistical concepts and methods provide a useful approach for a proper modelling.

Powerful computers are indispensable for this research on quantitative aspects of society: the abundance of data requires data bases and sophisticated methods of analysis, and many of the models require large–scale numerical simulations.

The partcipating groups are headed by