Multiscale simulation of fluid-structure problems, simulation of colloidal and/or polymeric systems, and artificial intelligence applied to scientific-industrial problems

 The use of numerical simulations applied to industry and science has come a long way since its inception in the 1940s leading to great successes in fields ranging from medicine and the design of new drugs, to materials science, engineering chemical, civil, or aerospace industry. The simulations have made it possible to understand many of the phenomena that were not understood how they worked, improve the efficiency in many of the processes and substantially lower the costs of industrial production by reducing to a minimum the costly experimental tests carried out via trial and error to obtain the product with the desired characteristics.

The need to study increasingly extensive systems with a higher detailed level of physicochemical interactions to obtain greater accuracy and precision, has led to increasingly complicated techniques and algorithms that require an expert group to handle them. and computer systems beyond the reach of most industries.

 The UIB, through the ACP, offers the experience, techniques and computational tools necessary to deal with some of the most challenging systems from the point of view of current numerical simulations:

(1) Simulation of fluid-structure interaction problems, which includes large deformations, incompressible fluids and complex geometries.

(2) The simulation of fluids and fluid mixtures in general, and in particular the multiscale simulation of problems where a fluid interacts with a non-trivial structure (eg surface covered by a filamentous layer, soft surface with roughness; fluids containing deformable soft particles such as red blood cells in the blood, etc).

(3) The simulation of systems in which there is a liquid / gas / solid (the matrix) that contains solid / liquid / gas elements of size between one tenth of a millimeter and one billionth of a meter, the so-called colloidal systems . Both the matrix and the elements within the matrix can be electrically charged or have magnetic properties. Our research group is an expert worldwide in the methodology necessary for the simulation of colloidal systems, both magnetic and electric or neutral. The world of colloidal systems is immense, encompassing systems as varied as emulsions, liquid crystals, bread, milk and cheese, or ferrofluids, to name just a few cases.

(4) The simulation of polymeric systems, which ranges from the study of isolated proteins and DNA to the study of sets of polymers that form the matrix of a plastic material or a complex polymeric structure such as polymeric brushes, or multilayers of polyelectrolytes.

(5) Systems in which it is necessary to simulate combinations of the aforementioned systems.

(6) The use of artificial intelligence techniques applied to scientific-industrial problems