Group Research, Vehicle Technology, VW

The Volkswagen Group is one of the world’s leading automobile manufacturers and the largest carmaker in Europe. It is the goal of the Group to offer attractive, safe and environmentally sound vehicles which are competitive on an increasingly tough market. Volkswagen's Group Research is working on every field of automotive application and is responsible for identifying, evaluating and transferring innovative technologies to advanced engineering or series development departments of all brands of the Volkswagen Group.

Dr. C. Othmer (carsten.othmer@volkswagen.de) is a member of the department "CAE methods" of the Volkswagen Group Research and is responsible for the development and implementation of CFD optimisation methodologies. He oversees the application of CFD optimisation methods and defines the research direction of VW in this field. His formulation of the continuous adjoint [Othmer 2008] is the basis for the existing adjoint code in OpenFOAM, and the achievements of his collaboration with the AboutFlow partner NTUA mark the state of the art of adjoint methodologies in the automotive sector.

• C. Othmer, "A continuous adjoint formulation for the computation of topological and surface sensitivities of ducted flows", Int. J. Num. Meth. Fluids, 58: 862-877, 2008, DOI: 10.1002/fld.1770
• A. Zymaris, D. Papadimitriou, K. Giannakoglou, C. Othmer, "Continuous Adjoint Approach to the Spalart-Allmaras Turbulence Model for Incompressible Flows", Computers & Fluids, 38, pp. 1528-1538, 2009.