SCAT - News

SCAT grantee receives Presidential honor

May 2008

Claudio Torres started his PhD in
Feb. 2008 at University of Delaware.

Newark, Delaware — Claudio Torres completed his SCAT research visit in Bristol last January. After a brief visit back home to Chile, he then traveled to the US to start his PhD studies at University of Delaware. Now, he has learned that he has been awarded the prestigious Beca Presidente de la Republica de Chile. This Presidential honor carries a monetary award that will cover Claudio's tuition fees and a stipend, plus travel expenses.

Claudio did his BSc and MSc at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, in Valparaiso. He then started his SCAT research visit to the University of Bristol, where he worked with Dr Lorena Barba for 10 months. During this time, he had the opportunity to meet Prof Louis Rossi who is a collaborator of Barba and visited Bristol in September 2007. Thus, when Claudio decided he wanted to go on to do a PhD, Dr Barba suggested he apply to University of Delaware, to work under Rossi's supervision.

Claudio joins the list of SCAT grantees that have finished their research visit and gone to other successes:

Personal statement

Here is the personal point of view of Claudio Torres, on his SCAT grant:

"The SCAT project has changed my life, this is because it gave me the opportunity to be in Bristol for 10 moths where I learned a huge number of different things, such as the language, the culture, computational fluid dynamics and so on. It was an unforgettable experience.

I remember the last days when I was in Chile, before the trip, I was very worried because it was the first time that I traveled abroad, I mean very far away. But, with time I learned that the only way to obtain anything is being brave and patient (and of course, you have to work 24/7), so, I can say that it was not easy but at the end you receive more than what you had spent.

The firsts months in Bristol were very challenging, we spent several meetings trying to understand the way to attack and enjoy the problems. I mean, we sometimes didn't get the results that we wanted but it was important to show those partial results at the meeting because I always received very good ideas and feedback from Barba's team. I think that the weekly presentations was the best way to keep ideas and scientific results flowing.

In the beginning, I worked on the problem of the circular vortex sheet. I started with that problem because it was the topic of my MSc thesis. After that, we moved to the panel method where our approach was to apply a desingularization. Then we worked on boundary conditions for vortex methods where we used the knowledge acquired from the previous topics; although the last topic gave us good results and new ideas to be used, it also presented a new challenge (spatial adaptation) as well, so, I finally finished my research working on spatial adaptation. We developed an algorithm to approach the solution based on block decomposition of the domain used in a iterative fashion, this results are in progress to be published as soon as possible.

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Lorena Barba, because she gave me the necessary advice to improve my skills and she recommended me to Prof. Louis Rossi, who is my current PhD advisor at University of Delaware, USA. I would like to also thank Mr. Boris Drappier for his courage and good advice. And of course, I would like to thank all the members of Barba's team, with whom I shared more than numerical results."