Clarkson Professor Receives $240,000 Grant from Air Force Office of Scientific Research for Computational Solar Physics
Chunlei Liang, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Clarkson, has been awarded a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for his research titled “Global Simulations of Solar Dynamo using the Spectral Difference with Divergence Cleaning Algorithm.”
All space weather fundamentally has its roots in the solar magnetic field. The global dynamo producing this magnetism remains difficult to predict numerically. Through this grant, Principal Investigator Liang and his students will model the global solar dynamo and simulate the magnetic field of the Sun using the spectral difference method with divergence cleaning (SDDC) on unstructured grids. The baseline SDDC algorithm was published in the Astrophysical Journal in 2022 by Chen & Liang. You can view that here: http://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac6e61
The project will support both graduate and undergraduate students at Clarkson, and students will perform large-scale computations on both CPUs and Nvidia GPUs.
Dr. Liang is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Associate Fellow (2012 class). He received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House in 2019. At Clarkson University, he was named an American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Fellow in 2022. He was also selected for the 2023 AIAA Abe M. Zarem Educator Award in Aeronautics.
