Each year, the Hans and Ria Messer foundation supports an outstanding early-career researcher at TU Darmstadt. This year the prize is endowed with 100,000€ and has been awarded to Tabea Tscherpel, a tenure-track professor in the Department of Mathematics and member of the research group Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing. The award recognizes her contributions to numerical analysis and her ongoing work on structure-preserving numerical schemes for fluid flow in curved and evolving domains.
Many fluid problems arise in geometrically complex settings: examples include blood flow in curved vessels, the motion of sea animals through water, or the slow free-surface flow of glaciers. In all these situations, the fluid domain is curved and may change shape over time, making precise and robust numerical approximation especially challenging.
Tabea Tscherpel’s work focuses on structure-preserving finite element methods, which achieve high accuracy and maintain essential physical properties of the underlying fluid equations. This includes energy consistency and pressure robustness for incompressible fluid equations. She has also contributed to numerical methods for non-Newtonian fluids and for complex boundary conditions. Her current research extends those methods to curved and evolving domains, where the central challenge is to approximate the geometry without introducing significant errors and, at the same time, to retain structure preservation of the numerical scheme.
The prize funding will support the development of her research agenda. A major portion will finance a doctoral position within her group. It will also contribute to academic exchange, including participation in conferences and collaborative meetings.
The award recognizes Tabea Tscherpel’s achievements to date and provides resources for advancing reliable and highly accurate numerical methods for complex fluid flows.
For more information please refer to: https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/aktuelles_meldungen/einzelansicht_532928.en.jsp. Image credit: TU Darmstadt/Klaus Mai.