University of California, San Diego
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department
del Álamo’s Research Group
Courses
Undergraduate Courses
Basic relations describing flow field around wings and bodies at subsonic and supersonic speed. Thin-wing theory. Slender-body theory. Formulation of theories for evaluating forces and moments on airplane geometries. Application to the design of high-speed airplanes.
Graduate Courses
Fluid statics; fluid kinematics; integral and differential forms of the conservation laws for mass, momentum and energy; Bernoulli equation; potential flows; dimensional analysis and similitude. Laminar and turbulent flow. Pipe flow including friction factor. Boundary layers, separation, drag, and lift. Compressible flow including shock waves.
MAE 223: Computational Fluid Dynamics
We will study numerical methods for the calculation of fluid flows. We will cover numerical integration schemes and spatial discretization methods for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. We will consider projection methods that decouple the calculation of pressure and velocity fields and multigrid methods for the calculation of the pressure. We will then study the implementation of complex boundary conditions through the immersed boundary method. The course will be completed by an introduction to high-performance computing of fluid flows in parallel computer architectures.
MAE 290A: Efficient Numerical Methods for Simulation, Optimization and Control
We will cover linear algebra, numerical methods, and numerical analysis. In particular, we will study direct and iterative methods for systems of linear and nonlinear equations, the fundamental matrix decompositions, function approximation, differentiation, integration and minimization.
Numerical solution of differential equations in mathematical physics and engineering, ordinary and partial differential equations. Linear and nonlinear hyperbolic parabolic, and elliptic equations, with emphasis on prototypical cases, the convection-diffusion equation, Laplace’s and Poisson equation. Finite difference methods will be considered in depth, and additional topics.
MAE 263: Mechanics Inside the Cell
We will study quantitative models that describe the mechanics of processes relevant to eukaryotic cell functions such as cell migration or mechanotransduction. We cover methods to measure mechanical aspects cellular nature and behavior such as intracellular rheology, intracellular force distribution, cell adhesion strength, generation of propulsive forces during locomotion.
We will study fundamental aspects of turbulence including the Kolmogorov cascade, shear flows, wall flows, etc, as well as computational and experimental methods to characterize these flows.