ERC Starting Grant for Anh Khoa Doan for predicting and controlling extreme events in flows
The European Research Council (ERC) has announced that Anh Khoa Doan, Assistant Professor in AI for Fluid Mechanics, will receive an ERC Starting Grant for his research on predicting and controlling extreme events in turbulent flows, such as the atmosphere or the oceans, with scientific machine learning. Predicting and controlling these events can help in making renewable technology more resilient and in creating a climate resilient society. This European grant of €1.5 million for a five-year research programme is intended to enable individual scientists to build their own teams and conduct groundbreaking research.
Both climate change and the use of renewable technology are likely to lead to more extreme events taking place in fluid flows, such as the atmosphere or the oceans. In these rare events the flow suddenly turns into an extreme state, often with far-reaching consequences. Think for example of extreme weather events such as atmospheric blocking leading to major long-lasting heatwaves. Or of rogue waves of extreme heights in our oceans that can capsize boats or damage offshore wind turbines. Using new, sustainable technology can also lead to these extreme events. Burning hydrogen in an aircraft engine, for example, can sometimes lead to flashbacks where the flame suddenly moves back from the combustor into the injection system, destroying it.
Anh Khoa Doan, Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence for Fluid Mechanics at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering, has now been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to develop scientific machine learning algorithms to predict and control these extreme events in flows.
Anh Khoa Doan: “Being able to predict these extreme events is a major challenge because of the chaotic nature of these turbulent flows. It’s a difficult task even for modern deep learning techniques, as they have to deal with the relative rarity of extreme events which is in contrast to traditional big data situations. In my project, I will develop a new scientific machine learning framework that seamlessly merges techniques from deep learning with physics-based flow solver. This combination will compensate for either approach's shortcomings and will enable the prediction, forecasting, and control of these extreme events in turbulent flows, mitigating their consequences.”
With this research Doan and his team will contribute towards more resilient sustainable technology and a more climate-resilient society.
It is a great honour for me to receive this grant. Although it's an individual grant, I worked with many collaborators and students on the results that served as the foundations for this proposal, and I would like to thank them. This grant will support my research at the interface of machine learning and fluid mechanics and allow me to shed new lights onto those complex flows. It will also further support the expansion of the AI Fluids lab.
Anh Khoa Doan
ERC Grants
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation.
ERC press release and complete list Starting Grants.
Dr. N.A.K. (Anh Khoa) Doan
Assistant Professor
✉ N.A.K.Doan@tudelft.nl