Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland

The Computational Physics of Engineering Materials group in the Institute for Building Materials is embedded in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. Our group is regarded as the competence centre for computational methods in research and teaching. Our current focus concerning granular material is the interaction and coupling of the grains and the surrounding fluid.

Competencies and facilities

Our institute has excellent track record in hosting foreign researchers. At present there are 13 PhD students in our group, either students from ETH or international students working in national or international projects. Our expertise is in developing new numerical methods and advancing existing computational methods within a broad range of research subjects, with a focus on microscopic models for modelling different materials, as soil, porous matter or granular matter in general. Regarding teaching, we are able to give students a broad overview on the existing methods in Computational Physics, and train them in implementing these methods. The developed software is used in different research projects. Additionally, commercial software as FLUENT as well as open source software like OpenFoam is used. The researchers will also have access to the high performance computing cluster (500 nodes, 7 TFlops) owned and operated by our group, enabling large scale computations. ESRs will benefit from the following courses: Introduction to Computational Physics; Computational Statistical Physics.

Key person

Prof. H. J. HERRMANN is head of Institute for Building Materials and of the Group on Computational Physics. He is renowned in DEM with and without coupling to the surrounding fluid, and has expertise on modelling of flow and particle transport in porous media. Prof Herrmann is Editor-in-Chief and founding editor of the Springer Journal ‘Granular Matter’ and ‘International Journal of Modern Physics C’, as well as being on the editorial board or reviewing panel of numerous other leading scientific journals. Prof. Herrmann published widely with broad coverage in physics and engineering.