PhD defense

Last week Theo Käufer very successfully defended his thesis on “Characterization of thermal turbulence by 3D temperature and velocity measurements and physics-informed machine learning”. Thanks to Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation and Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung Foundation for the financial support. Also big thanks to the external reviewers George Karniadakis from the Brown University and Miguel Alfonso Mendez from VKI.
During the last 4 years he was working on the direct measurements of the convective heat transfer in 3D. For this the velocity and the temperature had to be measured simultaneously, which he performed using thermochromic liquid crystals as tracer particles for Lagrangian particle tracking velocimetry (Link paper: Volumetric Lagrangian temperature and velocity measurements with thermochromic liquid crystals ). Finally, the data was used in a collaboration with the group of George Karniadakis applying physics informed machine learning to successfully infer temperature from only velocity data (Link paper: Inferring turbulent velocity and temperature fields and their statistics from Lagrangian velocity measurements using physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks).
The photos show Theo after the official defence and the maybe even more important examination by his colleagues where he earned his PhD hat. Theo, all the best for your future scientific journey in the US!