Research

With the help of ab-initio molecular dynamics simulations we were able to show that it is possible to use femtosecond laser pulses to induce the ultrafast nonthermal formation of NV-centers in diamond. NV centers are of fundamental importance in quantum technologies.

The cost of energy produced by wind turbines has been undergoing a steady reduction. Wind energy supplied 15% of the electricity demand of the European Union in 2019. Since rotor blades are the determining component for both performance and loads, they are the objective of further optimizations. To obtain high efficiencies, an increased use of special aerodynamic profiles is observed possessing large areas of low-resistance, which means laminar flow is maintained. In order to design such profiles, it is necessary to include the laminar-turbulent transition in CFD simulations of wind turbine blades. Thus, the objective of the project is to carry out high-fidelity numerical simulations of the flow around a wind turbine blade at a realistic

Shallow water simulations are important for climate models, flood or tsunami predictions and other applications. Performing such simulations on unstructured meshes with the Discontinuous Galerkin method is numerically attractive, but a performance challenge on conventional architectures. With a customized dataflow architecture implemented on FPGAs, we have improved performance and power efficiency on a single FPGA and achieved promising initial results when scaling to multiple FPGAs via direct FPGA-to-FPGA interconnects.

PALM-4U is a newly developed high-resolution urban-climate model. It is designed as a tool for researchers and city planners to simulate and analyze the urban climate and its effects on city dwellers. The key feature of PALM-4U is its capacity to directly resolve turbulence effects and provide highly accurate simulation results. Apart from that, PALM-4U offers further features such as sophisticated bio-climate and air chemistry analysis or a multi-agent model that simulates individual city dwellers wandering across the city. To gain confidence in PALM-4U, extensive evaluation is necessary.

Accurate parameter-free calculations of optical response functions for real materials and nanostructures still represent a major challenge for computational materials science. Our project focusses on the development and application of efficient but accurate ab-initio methods that give access to the linear and nonlinear optical spectra. We explore, on the atomistic level, how the material structure, its composition and defects, but also external parameters like stress, temperature or magnetic fields influence the optical response. It thus leads to a better understanding of existing materials and contributes to the design of new photonic materials.

In this project the goal is to use algorithms to predict classes of the library classification system “Basisklassifikation” (which can be translated as basic classification). A library classification system is a taxonomy of predefined classes that represent disciplines, subdisciplines, themes or types of publications. Subject librarians assign one or more of these classes to each publication, allowing both final users or retrieval system to use this annotated information for finding publications. As input data we observe mainly bibliographic data, such as for example the title, the name of the publisher, the year of publication and the language of the publication. The algorithms should suggest several classes, which are then analyzed by

Cancer mutanome vaccines targeting neoepitopes derived from somatic mutations have ideal properties to become an essential part of modern multimodal cancer therapy. Our goal is to fully realize this personalized cancer immunotherapy concept by addressing the key genomic and immunological challenges for successful application of this approach in patients with any type of cancer.

We work on imaging for particle therapy. Particle beams (e.g. protons) can precisely destroy tumors while sparing healthy tissue. To verify the irradiation, Compton cameras (CC) can be used to detect gamma rays emerging from the patient. CC require complex algorithms to reconstruct images. We employ Monte Carlo simulations to recreate the irradiation and test reconstruction algorithms. The simulations and development of reconstruction approaches require much computing power. Thanks to HLRN, we simulate realistic therapeutic beams, the emerging rays and its detection with CC, and can test our reconstruction. Our approaches notably improve image quality. Further improvements are planed using a-prori information and refined data selection.

ICON-ART is the next generation model for seamless simulation of numerical weather forecast, climate prediction and atmospheric composition modelling. It is a joint development project of DWD (German Weather Service), MPI-M (Max-Planck-Institute of Meteorology), DKRZ (German Climate Computing Center), and KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). At IMK-ASF the simulations focus on the understanding of composition-climate interactions as well as atmospheric chemical and microphysical processes on different scales

Hybrid RANS/LES (HRLES) is one SRS category, which bridges the gap between RANS and LES in regard to prediction accuracy of the results and required computing resources. The HRLES methods (i.e. various Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) formulations), with RANS modelling of the flow near the wall, and eddy-resolving simulation away from the wall, are believed to represent the mixing in turbulent flows