Philipp Birken

My research area is scientific computing for a sustainable world. We design and analyze numerical methods for the simulation of gas flows and their interaction with surrounding media. These methods are then used to help design wind turbines, to understand turbulent combustion in jet engines that run on renewable jet fuel, and to improve climate simulations and weather predictions. 

Specifically, the research is about time dependent nonlinear PDEs, particular those from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and fluid structure interaction (FSI). The appearing problems are stiff, thus naturally leading to adaptive implicit time integration schemes and consequently the question of how to solve large nonlinear and linear equation systems efficiently. There, I work both on iterative solvers for coupled problems, and on improving Newton- and Multigrid Methods. 

I am one of the two co-chairs of the research school COMPUTE, that focuses on scientific discovery using computing in the widest sense.

I have also a strong interest in improving the education in computational science, particularly at the Faculty of Science. To this end, I led the working group that established our new master programs computational science and applied computational science, starting in autumn 2023. Currently I am acting as the director of these programs.