Dr Philipp P Vieweg started his academic career by studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Hof. After receiving his Bachelor’s degree in 2018, he decided to switch to more fundamental studies and graduated with a Master’s degree in Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics from University of Technology Ilmenau in 2020. Trapped in the basin of attraction of Theoretical and Numerical Fluid Mechanics, he successfully completed his PhD with honours in July 2023 at the same place under the supervision of Dr Jörg Schumacher.
Since then, he has actively been contributing as a post-doctoral scientist to the fluid mechanics community. He subsequently joined the group of Dr Colm-Cille P Caulfield at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge as a Walter Benjamin Fellow in April 2024.
His research is mainly located in the field of Computational Physics and motivated by geo- and astrophysical applications such as the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, or the solar convection zone. In more detail, he utilises large-scale Direct Numerical Simulations (in some cases on more than 130,000 CPUs) of simplified physical configurations – such as unstably stratified Rayleigh-Bénard convection or stably stratified shear-driven turbulence – to understand the formation and scalar transport of horizontally extended long-living flow structures, the latter of which are superimposed to chaotic turbulence on smaller time and length scales. This research comprises for instance the analysis of the leading Lyapunov vector, the identification of (inverse) cascades of spectral energy, as well as the advection of Lagrangian particles and the evaluation of their trajectories’ coherence using Unsupervised Machine Learning.
Given the perpetual changes in climate, the interdisciplinarity of his research is more in demand than ever. He thus collaborates internationally with both theorists and experimentalists.