Research Fellows
James Koch
Early Stage Researcher 8 at National Technical University of Athens
I was born in the United States in the city of Saint Louis, Missouri. From a young age I was driven to understand the world around me; a desire which pushed me to study physics at Grinnell College in Iowa, where I earned my bachelors of Arts in Physics in 2012. Despite how strongly physics appealed to me, environmental and global studies at Grinnell brought to light the importance that renewable energy and, specifically, water purification technology would have in society's future development. Thus I decided to continue my education in a more practical field; mechanical engineering. I received both a bachelors and masters of science in mechanical engineering from Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri in 2015 with a master's thesis on the modeling and optimization of forward osmosis desalination membrane technology. During my time at Washington University, I decided that the fields of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and optimization were of paramount importance to my skill set in regards to pursuing a career in desalination research and development, ultimately leading me to join the IODA project.
My position as IODA ESR 8 is related to the development of transitional tools between the processes of continuous adjoint-based topology and shape optimization, and their application to cases relating to automotive industry. As my project progresses, I will begin to implement application-based constraints into the topology to shape transitional tools. I am positioned at the National Technical University of Athens in the Mechanical Engineering department's Parallel CFD and Optimization Unit, and am honored to be working with my supervisor, Kyriakos Giannakoglou, and the other members of his lab as a PhD student. I also have the privilege to collaborate with the IODA industrial partners ENGYS and Volkswagen during my scheduled secondments, each of which will allow me to test and assess the tools I have developed on real-world applications.
I am tremendously grateful for the opportunity to participate in the IODA project: the chance to develop relationships and cultivate experience with its universally high-grade research fellows and industrial partners is an unparalleled opportunity to enhance my scientific research skill set. Furthermore, I am excited to be part of a European project and gain insight into a community which I would otherwise not have access to as a United States Citizen.
Objectives:
•Continued development of continuous adjoint topology and shape optimization methods.
•Coupling aforementioned shape and topology methods in a sequential manner.
•Development of software capable of handling industrial geometrical constraints and producing
optimized results which are compatible with major CAD formatting software.