Speaker: Hessam Babaee, Ph.D. Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277 Dec. 10, 13:00--14:00 Abstract:Highly convective thermo-fluid systems have a difficult phenomenon to predict: transient instabilities. While these instabilities have finite lifetimes, they can play a crucial role either by altering the system dynamics through the activation of other instabilities or by creating sudden nonlinear energy transfers that lead to extreme responses. However, their essentially transient character makes their description a particularly challenging task. We develop a minimization framework that focuses on the optimal approximation of the system dynamics in the neighbourhood of the system state. This minimization formulation results in differential equations that evolve a time-dependent basis so that it optimally approximates the most unstable directions. Several thermo-fluid demonstration cases will be presented that shows the performance of the presented method. Bio: Dr. Hessam Babaee is an expert in the area of hydrodynamic instability, uncertainty quantification, reduced-order modeling and high performance computing. He is currently a tenure-stream Assistant Professor in Swanson School of Engineering at University of Pittsburgh and a Research Scientist in Mechanical Engineering Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to joining University of Pittsburgh, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters degree in Applied Mathematics from Louisiana State University both awarded in 2013.