I was born in 1983 in Thessaloníki, Greece. While growing up, I witnessed the surplus of natural renewable energy resources of Greece not being exploited, but rather as a society to rely on problematic solutions. Stimulated by this, I decided to study Engineering and focus on sustainable development. Thus, I enrolled in Industrial Engineering department of Democritus University of Thrace, where I graduated from in 2007. Through my studies I built a solid background in the discipline of Industrial engineering, following, among others, courses about fluid dynamics, computational mechanics, machine elements and material properties.

Stimulated by my environmental sensitivities and my belief that sustainable energy development will bring numerous positive effects on society, in 2009 I went to the Netherlands to attend the Sustainable Energy Technology Master program, in Delft University of Technology. There, I specialized in wind energy, advancing my understanding of aerodynamics, turbine loads and control systems. My passion for research led me, in 2012, to the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency. Interaction with people in the team from diverse scientific backgrounds helped me to advance further as researcher and to develop a more holistic scientific approach.

My position in the AboutFlow project is related with the unsteady continuous adjoint optimization methods with application to industrial cases. As a fresh PhD student, I am glad being part of the Parallel CFD and Optimization Unit, in the Mechanical Engineering department of National Technical University of Athens. Initially, I will focus my research on investigating alternatives to the common problems of computational time and storage requirements, which are evident in unsteady optimization problems. In a later stage I will implement tools to increase stability and speed of the primal and adjoint solution.

I strongly believe that my participation in the AboutFlow project is a first-class opportunity to increase my knowledge in the wide field of Computational Fluid Dynamics. Furthermore, my placements in industrial partners, namely ENGYS and VW, will bring me facing complicated real-world problems. There, the previously developed tools and methods will be tested and their performance will be assessed.

It is unquestionable that participating in an European project as demanding, intensive and broad as the AboutFlow project will benefit each and every member in developing their scientific skills. However, I believe that being a Marie Curie fellow is not just that. The honor of having such a prestigious position should be given to people that apart from being top researchers they look forward to developing in a personal level. Through various workshops, personal skills, such as time-management and teamwork, just to mention few, will be evolved. Moreover, I am more than happy that I will have the opportunity to meet, interact and work with fellow participants with diverse backgrounds. I am convinced that all fellows share similar goals and common future vision, and personally I believe that projects such as AboutFlow promote true European integration in a societal level.

Objectives:

• Increase numerical stability and effiency
• Application to unsteady industrial optimisation cases

Contribute to Work Packages

• WP 2
• WP 3
• WP 5

My work is associated with unsteady flow optimization problem, considering the unsteady continuous adjoint formulation. In this framework my work focuses both on alternative, to the currently established one, techniques for  retrieving the primal variables time fields. Secondly, increased numerical stability and convergance will be achieved by reformulating the primal unsteady Navier-Stokes equations. 

When the continuous adjoint method is applied to unsteady flow problems, the standard compromise between computational cost and memory storage requirements is the so called binomial check-pointing technique. For a given number of time instants, the check-pointing technique determines the optimal distribution of flow field solution snapshots in time which ensures minimal recomputations of the flow (primal) solutions. Despite the reduced storage requirement of the check-pointing technique, the extra computational cost, due to the necessary recomputations, may prove to be non-affordable for large scale problems. 

My work makes use of alternative techniques to check-pointing in order to handle unsteady flows, based on the approximation of the time-evolution of flow fields, so as to entirely overcome recomputations.
Both an incremental Fast Fourier series and a incremental Singular Value Decomposition method have been considered as such.

 

I higly value the purpose of public engagement. Researchers as active members of the research community should try their best to make the public better acquainted with technological advancements and the ways that the latter could alter their life. 

In this light, myself and two more colegues, Mehdi Ghavami Nejad (ESR9) and Flavio Galiardi (IODA project), have participated in the Researchers' Night (the content is in Greek), organized by the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), among other partners.  This event is part of the European framework "2014-2015 Researchers' Night: The Greek events", funded by the European program Horizon 2020. The Researchers' Night  took place in the Averof building of NTUA's histrorical campus, on Friday, September 25, 2015.  

As participants, we had the opportunity to explain our work and demostrate our research to the public and especially young people. We used a video projector, showing recent research results, while we also had a big screen with a presentation playing in a loop. We interacted with a lot of people who were asking questions specifically regarding the purpose of our research but also more general questions about the Computational Fluid Dynamics field, such as what are  the means that are used,  academia and industry interaction, etc. 

Overall, for me personally it was a very interesting and refreshing experience, as I had to talk to a lot of people that are not familiar with CFD or research at all. Moreover, I had the opportunity to increase public awareness of research and innovation activities, the impact that these have in daily life and, hopefully, motivate some of the younger people who attended the event. Finally, I highly value the feeling of returing something back to the society, which indirectly, suport research in general and especially young reserachers as myself in particular