Physics of Fluids
Source: https://www.utwente.nl/en/education/master/programmes/applied-physics/specialisations/physics-of-fluids/ Parent: https://www.utwente.nl/en/education/master/programmes/applied-physics/
Join our leading experts in the field of fluid dynamics and find solutions to challenges in areas like healthcare, climate change, energy, high-tech manufacturing, astronautics, agriculture and more.
Water flowing from the tap, the rush of air around a speeding car, the circulation of blood in our bodies. We may not always realise it, but fluid dynamics is all around us. Moreover, it plays a vital role in finding solutions to major societal and industrial challenges, and often is the critical component in manufacturing and operation. For example, bubbles are now used to reduce drag on marine vessels, enabling ships to consume less energy and lowering their emissions substantially. On a micro- and nanoscale, lithography machines used to make chips for companies like Samsung, Intel and AMD are fundamentally relying on fluid dynamics to operate. And fluid dynamics are essential within healthcare, for example in improving the quality and accuracy of medical imaging or enabling targeted drug delivery in the human body. And these are just a few of the extremely broad range of applications. If you want to deepen your understanding of the behaviour of fluids and how you can control this, the specialisation in Physics of Fluids is right for you.
I am convinced that we presently live in the golden age of fluid dynamics. There are huge challenges for mankind to which fluid dynamics majorly contributes. It is about flow in the ocean and the atmosphere, about blood circulation in your body. It is about bacteria, and it will play a major role in renewable energy production. Everything flows – ‘panta rhei’
Prof. Dr. Detlef Lohse
Contact
Full Professor in Physics of Fluids.
What is Physics of Fluids?
Fluid dynamics is the science and engineering of moving liquids, gases and particles. If you specialise in Physics of Fluids, you will join the renowned Physics of Fluids group of the University of Twente. They study a wide variety of flow phenomena, both fundamental and applied, combining experimental, theoretical, and numerical methods to solve problems in fluid dynamics. The range of topics goes from nanobubbles to accretion disks, from granular flow to medical flow, and from wind turbines to microfluidic chips.
What makes this field both fascinating and challenging is the variety of complexities you can come across in the behaviour of fluids. Think, for example, of phase transitions that fluids can undergo, and how factors like temperature, speed and the materials involved influence how fluids move. With your expertise, you will be able to contribute to solutions to many challenges in areas like healthcare, climate change, energy, high-tech manufacturing, astronautics, agriculture and food production, and much more.
Examples of courses you will follow during this specialisation:
- In Advanced Fluid Mechanics you will learn how to derive the governing equations for fluid dynamics, stability analysis for several instabilities, how waves propagate and disperse, and many more details on how fluids work. It will form the basis for many other courses like Turbulence, Granular Matter, Heat and Mass Transfer, Physics of bubbles, and many more.
- In the course Experimental Techniques in Physics of Fluids you will learn all the ways we can experimentally obtain details from a flow. This can be for example pressure, density, temperature, or velocity. We cover how images are taken in (high-speed) cameras and a large variety of optical techniques and algorithms to obtain e.g. the flow velocity from these images.
- Laminar flows are the exception, any flow larger than a couple of centimetres is generally turbulent. In the Turbulence course, you will learn many details about the omnipresence of turbulence. How to describe a flow in a statistical sense, understand the concept of an energy cascade, and how to interpret spectra and structure functions.
The University of Twente is renowned for its research in fluid dynamics. Joining the specialisation in Physics of Fluids, you will have the opportunity to learn from and work with top professors and have access to an excellent scientific environment with outstanding lab facilities. Moreover, many fundamental fluid dynamics problems have a direct tie to real-life projects that stem directly from industry, thanks to close ties with industrial partners such as Canon, ASML, MARIN, and Medspray to name a few. Others are strongly related to climate change: icebergs, glaciers, windfarms, ocean currents et cetera.
What will you learn?
As a graduate of this Master's and this specialisation, you have acquired specific, scientific knowledge, skills and values, which you can put to good use in your future job.
Knowledge
After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- will have a deep knowledge of a variety of instabilities in fluid dynamics;
- have knowledge of a wide variety of fluid dynamics topics: from nano to giga meters;
- will have a wide set of knowledge ranging from (high speed) cameras, optics, lasers, material science, simulations and modelling, as well as theoretical tools to study all kinds of problems.
Skills
After successfully finishing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- are able to identify the relevant parameters to study fluid dynamics problems and you will be able to predict scaling behaviour for fluid dynamical problems;
- are able to design and perform experiments, simulations, or theoretical analyses on all kinds of relevant problems in nature and industry.
Values
After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- can have a large impact on large societal questions on climate change, future health diagnostics, agriculture, industrial processes, and many more vital questions.
Other master’s and specialisations
Is this specialisation not exactly what you are looking for? Maybe one of the other specialisations suits you better. Or find out more about related Master’s:
- Master’s in Mechanical Engineering (specialisation in Energy & Flow)
- Master’s in Applied Mathematics