Fred Hohman

Mathematics & Computational Science REU

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) are summer research programs for students in science, engineering, and mathematics.

I participated in Fairfield University’s REU in Mathematics & Computational Science where I was supervised by Dr. Shanon Reckinger of the Mechanical Engineering Department of Fairfield University. Our project directly compared numerical solutions derived from the Navier-Stokes equations to designed experiments performed at the lab-scale to model a specific oceanic phoneme: overflow.

Experimental Overflows.
A titled grid of our experimental overflows.

Overflows in the ocean occur when dense water flows down a continental slope into less dense ambient water. These density driven plumes occur naturally in various locations in the global ocean, but it is important to study idealized and small-scale models which allow for stronger confidence and control of parameters.

My group designed and built an experiment to mimic oceanic overflow while also configuring the MIT General Circulation Model on a Linux computer cluster to parallel compute numerical simulations. We then directly compared our experimental data with our numerical simulations using MATLAB for pre- and post-processing visualization.

JMM Winning Poster.
Our winning JMM poster. Click to view the full .pdf.

We presented our research at the 2014 REU Mini-Conference at Yale University, the 2014 American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting, and we were awarded 1st place in the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meeting Undergraduate Poster Session for Computational Mathematics.

Thanks @JointMath for ranking our poster number 1 in Computational Math! @treetree27 @maanow #jmm15 pic.twitter.com/mk06wA0PQd

— Fred Hohman (@fredhohman) January 13, 2015

The project has also been featured by MITgcm.

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