Multi-Scale Physics

Welcome to the Department of Multi-Scale Physics.

The Department of Multi-Scale Physics (MSP) is dealing with Industrial and Environmental Processes in the world around us. With a staff of 14 professors and some 35 postdocs and PhD students, MSP aims at a better understanding, a better description and - in industry - a better control of these processes. We think mankind should produce products and energy in a cleaner, more sustainable and more efficient way. MSP wishes to contribute to more sustainable industrial processes and a more sustainable earth.

MSP considers flow and transport phenomena over a wide range of time and length scales in their mutual dependence. We study the interaction of molecular transport of heat and mass, chemical reactions, turbulent eddies, bubbles, drops and particles, and flow and convective transport at the scale of the vessel or at a long range. Usually, we use continuum concepts for describing these phenomena and processes, sometimes (under rarefied conditions) molecular models.
To this end, MSP exploits a wide variety of advanced computational and experimental tools

MSP researcher in the news:

Reach For the Sky

bron: The Wall Street Journal (complete article in PDF format here)

By BEN WRIGHT

For Prof. Harmen Jonker, the best days are overcast. When the skies are clear and the suns shines, he retreats to his laboratory at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands to make his own clouds.

Prof. Jonker and his colleagues, Professors Herman Russchenberg and Pier Siebesma, believe that clouds hold the key to unlocking predictions about climate change.

For all their ubiquity, clouds are among the least well understood phenomena in the natural world; until recently they were almost a complete mystery to even the scientists who studied them. And without understanding them better, any attempt at climate forecasting is, at best, an educated guess, according to Prof. Jonker.

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Foto: John Weber in Wall Street Journal

"Clouds are the cause of the largest uncertainty in our understanding of how the atmosphere interacts with solar and heat radiation," he says. "We need to get this right to bring the uncertainty of climate and weather exchange forecasts to acceptable levels."

This lack of understanding about clouds is due to their enormous and, to most people, surprising complexity. Clouds are formed and shaped by a complicated interplay of atmospheric thermodynamics: by wind, turbulence and temperature -- factors that are hard enough to understand in their own right. Added to this are the chemistry of fine dust particles in the air and the physics of droplet formation around those aerosols.