The IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society36th International Conference on Plasma Science and 23rd Symposium on Fusion Engineering were held at the Omni San Diego Hotel - May 31 - June 5 2009This is the first time that International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) and Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE) had joint technical and social programs. A "theme" of the conference was "sustainability"; recyclable and reusable items were used throughout the conference. The combined conference was chaired by MAE Professor Farhat Beg and Dr. Mark Tillack (Research Scientist in MAE and Associate Director of the Center for Energy Research). The conference was a great success, with attendance by 700 delegates from 31 countries. In the opening session, Professor Beg and Dr. Tillack made welcome remarks followed by brief presentations by Dr. Art Ellis, Vice Chancellor for Research at UC San Diego and Professor Frieder Seible, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering. They gave a brief overview of the involvement of UCSD in plasma physics and fusion energy related research. Approximately 800 papers were presented. The technical program included joint "super plenary" speeches, ICOPS and SOFE plenary speeches, invited and contributed talks, and posters. The topics that attracted the highest number of abstracts in ICOPS were: High Energy Density Physics, Medical, Biological and Environmental Applications, Fast Z-Pinches and X-Ray Lasers, Nonequilibrium Plasma Applications and High Pressure and Thermal Plasma Processing. The most popular topics in SOFE included ITER and Experimental Devices, Diagnostics and Data Acquisition, Reactor Studies, Fusion Chamber Technologies, and Plasma Support Technologies. In addition to the technical program, many opportunities for sightseeing and socializing were available to the attendees. These included a lavish welcome reception, a reception for IEEE members and women in science and engineering, a night at the Padres baseball game, and the traditional awards banquet. Dr. René Raffray, also of the MAE department and CER, was awarded the 2009 IEEE/NPSS Fusion Technology Award "For his internationally recognized expertise in fusion engineering and his outstanding contributions to fusion technology, especially in the area of high heat flux components for both magnetic and inertial fusion energy." More details...
Professor Xanthippi Markenscoff recently unified the treatment of driving forces on moving defects: cracks, dislocations and inclusion boundaries, by obtaining an evolution equation for a moving inclusion boundary with eigenstrain, which extends to dynamics the classical Eshelby inclusion problem. The "driving force" on the boundary is the dynamic Eshelby energy-momemtum tensor computed for an expanding spherical inclusion, and, in the limit, for a plane boundary moving in general motion, analogously to dislocations and cracks. Professor Markenscoff presented lectures on this topic at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University, as well as at Northwestern University and at the Broberg Memorial Meeting in Sweden. Recently, she also presented lectures on the Cosserat Spectrum Theory at the invitation of Sir John Ball, and at the Cosserat Centennial celebration meeting in Paris as general lecture on the contributions of the Cosserat brothers to Solid Mechanics.
Professor Frank Talke inaugurated the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series on May 27th with a talk on
MAE student Baldomero Alonso-Latorre was awarded the 2009 Student Research Achievement Award in the category of Motility for the poster presentation of his work titled "Distribution of traction forces associated with shape changes in migrating amoeboid cells" at the 2009 annual meeting of the Biophysical Society held in Boston, MA. Baldomero works with Professors Juan C. Lasheras and Juan C. del Alamo on a project aiming to obtain a more profound understanding of the coupling between the biochemistry and the mechanics of cell locomotion, a process which is deeply involved in a wide range of physiological and pathological processes, ranging from the development of the embryo or the defense against infections to the formation of atherosclerotic clots or the metastatic spread of cancer.
UC San Diego's 1-unit freshman seminars combine entertainment with academic rigor. The Physics of Surfing, for example, uses accelerometers and GPS to examine the science behind the perfect wave. The surfing class -- co-taught by Stefan Llewellyn Smith, associate professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering -- meets weekly, with lectures and lab experiments. One lecture covers the fluid dynamics of the surfboard. Another explores what makes Black's Beach -- just down the coast from Scripps Pier -- one of the top surf breaks in the world. Short answer: It's the canyon on the ocean floor. The class is part of a program started at UC campuses in 2003, 1-unit classes exclusively for freshmen. The classes are academically worthy but give students a break from the grind that comes from carrying four 4-unit classes heavy with reading lists, term papers and exams. Read more at the LA Times...
Congenital heart defects account for five times more deaths annually than all childhood cancers combined. Alison Marsden, an assistant Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Professor at UC San Diego, has developed a unique set of computer modeling tools that are expected to enhance pediatric surgeons’ ability to perform critical heart surgery on children. Marsden’s work focuses on designing and using simulation tools to provide a way of testing new surgery designs on the computer before trying them on patients. Certain severe forms of congenital heart defects leave a patient with only one functional heart pumping chamber. These “single ventricle” defects are uniformly fatal if left untreated, and require a patient to undergo multiple heart surgeries, ending with a Fontan procedure. Read more...
Understanding the stability of flowing fluids and plasmas is an important scientific and technological challenge. The traditional approach of using modal expansions turns out to be insufficient: non-orthogonal eigenfunctions and the existence of a continuous spectrum associated with critical layers lead to a rich variety of complicated phenomena in space and time. A recent workshop at the Mathematical Research Center for Industrial Technology (MRIT) of Kyushu University, Japan, entitled "Math-for-Industry Tutorial: Spectral theories of non-Hermitian operators and their application" investigated these topics. Specialists from Japan and elsewhere gave a series of lectures on basic mathematical notions, current status and novel techniques to handle non-Hermitian operators. MAE Professor Stefan Llewellyn Smith gave two hour-long lectures titled "Fluid instability, the continuous spectrum and asymptotic models" and "Vortex axisymmetrization".
John Taylor, a recent Ph.D. from MAE, was awarded the 2008 Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics. This award is annually bestowed by the American Physical Society to an individual whose dissertation is selected to be outstanding in the area of fluid dynamics during that year. John's thesis titled "Numerical Simulations of the Stratified Oceanic Bottom Boundary Layer," was advised by Prof. Sutanu Sarkar. The selection committee commended John's dissertation for "insight provided into the behavior of turbulence in stable stratification that stood out as a novel contribution to our understanding of oceanography, with considerable potential for long-term impact." John Taylor is currently working at MIT with Prof. Rafael Ferrari (a fellow UCSD graduate with a Ph.D. from SIO!) as a NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow. Read more...
MAE student Ilenia Battiato has been awarded the Outstanding Student Paper Award for her presentation at the Hydrology Section of AGU (American Geophysical Union) 2008 Fall Meeting in San Francisco. Ilenia works with Professor Daniel Tartakovsky on hybrid modeling of reactive transport in porous media. In the words of the AGU Leadership Committee, "Her presentation was recognized as among the best of a strong group of student presenters, which sets an example for her fellow students and the entire AGU membership." Outstanding Student Paper Award winners will be listed in an upcoming publication of EoS, the weekly newspaper of AGU, and she will be receiving a formal certificate of achievement.
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