Industry

Automotive

With 75% of vehicle gas (energy) consumption directly related to factors associated with vehicle weight, the potential benefits of weight reduction enable smaller power plant (engine, turbine, fuel cells, etc.) and energy storage (battery, flywheel, etc.)systems, with corresponding cost and/or performance benefits.  In all cases, the safety and crash worthiness of lighter weight vehicles is a significant consideration.  Rensselaer faculty are working closely with the Automotive Composites Consortium to develop multiscale modeling and simulation tools that would efficiently predict dynamic crush response of composite structures for use in automotive body design.

Aerospace

One crucial aspect of turbulence that makes it such a challenge is its multi-scale character involving, high Reynolds numbers, coupled dynamics covering many orders of magnitude of length and time-scales. In heated surfaces there is a diverse range of scales, in the order of centimeters all the way to nano-scales. Highly turbulent flow around heated surface includes applications in turbines blades, missiles, power generation systems, solar arrays and reentry vehicles. In high speed flows, compressible turbulent boundary layers play an important role in many aerospace engineering applications such as propulsion system, high-speed aircraft, missiles and so on. Skin friction drag and the heat transfer law on the surface are important flow parameters to be determined in the aerodynamic heating calculations and are necessary input in thermal management systems.

Biomedical

The Biomedical field has made advancements in many areas from brain tissue analysis to blood flow to impact of cancer radiation as well as research on diabetes.   

 

Computer Science

 

Defense

 MSEC faculty members work in collaboration with several DoD Agencies and National Labs towards the solution of fundamental scientific problems that are critical to the national security. Multiscale modelling is being applied in an extremely wide range of applications ranging from the modeling of nanoscale physical and chemical phenomena governing the behavior of explosive materials to the simulations of large structures subject to extreme loading events.

Energy

Energy security is the grand challenge of this century. The very survival of the human race depends on this! We expect that multiscale science and engineering will play a pivotal role in solving many of the most challenging problems in this field- from novel multiscale catalyst-electrode architectures for next generation solar cells, fuel cells and batteries to novel multiscale materials for hydrogen production and storage.

Environment

Removal of CO2 from power plant flue gases using inorganic membranes; the design of high-performance membranes for water purification and desalination; more active, selective and stable catalysts with optimized hierarchical pore network structure so as to produce selectively the products we want (or remove those we do not want) in a smaller volume; stable fuel cell catalysts that use less noble metals. Each of these is a multiscale problem in space and/or in time that requires the coupling of atomistic with continuum simulations. At Rensselaer we are making progress on these and more challenges that contribute to energy and environmental sustainability.

Materials

The development of new materials is largely an experimental endeavor based on accumulated experience and knowledge. This trial-and-error-type approach which has dominated the field for centuries is expensive and relatively slow. Multiscale modeling has the capability to add a new dimension to the field. Computer-aided material design for target properties is becoming a reality. The technologies currently being developed at Rensselaer and elsewhere target spatial and temporal scale linking and the integration of physics taking place on multiple scales with the objective of predicting properties on the system scale. This will facilitate material optimization by computationally exploring a large domain of the material design phase space, at a fraction of the cost associated with attempting this by experimental means. Moreover, once the nano-, meso- and micro-scale structure of the material is known, multiscale modeling can be used to determine the optimal processing route that may lead to the desired structure. These concepts are most valuable in the context of developing nanostructured and multiscale structured materials which are broadly considered today the materials of the future.