Ilmenau Fluid Dynamics Scientist: "Everything around us flows and streams"

Hello, Professor Schumacher, you have headed the Fluid Mechanics Group since 2013. Why did you decide to do research in this field?

I started studying physics at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1988. In the basic studies, the physicists took the lectures together with the meteorologists and the crystallographers, because there was an orientation into the two mentioned fields in addition to pure physics. And so, in the course of the lecture, fluid mechanics aroused my interest.

In 1991, after my intermediate diploma, I found out where I could do something with fluid mechanics in physics in Germany. Of course, there were not so many offers. In the end, however, I came across the university in Marburg an der Lahn. So I moved to Marburg, then wrote my diploma thesis in the field of fluid mechanics and have remained true to flow processes ever since.

In other words, you came to your field via detours. How do you manage to build a bridge to high school graduates so that they too, like you, come to the conclusion: "Yes, I would like to study fluid mechanics"?

It's like this: Everything around us flows and streams in some way, even if we're sometimes not fully aware of it. It starts with things in the home that have to do with water, like cooking. Then we have it when looking into the atmosphere or even further into the cosmos. These are all processes that have to do with flow movements and are also often described with fluid mechanics models. But there are also other important topics in the field of technology. This starts with how we move at all, whether by vehicles, airplanes, or ships. And goes on to the topic of the environment in the direction of climate, weather to the oceans to astrophysics, for example, when it comes to the question of how our earth or the sun generate their magnetic fields and how they interact with each other. Then we can go even further and take a look inside our bodies. There are all sorts of interesting fluid processes as well, such as the blood flowing through our vessels. Fluid mechanics offers a very wide range of topics.

As I mentioned at the beginning: everything flows. And I think that is such an entry motivation with which you could interest young people in the field.

Through which funding programs or external partners do you try to reach out to potential students?

Of course, we always have the Study Information Day here at the TU Ilmenau. We are regularly represented there. Everyone can come and see what we do. We try to describe to young people what problems there are that directly affect their own lives.

When you think about your field of research now, to what extent do you see new perspectives or even research areas in the future that play little or perhaps no role today, but could play a role for recent graduates in ten years' time?

Primarily, I think that the current subfields will continue to develop. But I can't imagine a fundamentally new field emerging from the ground.

As in all other scientific fields, our handling of data will change rapidly. Both the amount of data in experiments and the computational capacities are getting bigger and bigger. That means the amount of data we can generate when we study flows will become more extensive and diverse.

A second thing is the technology of how we compute something. Here, we have recently been using a completely new type of technology, called quantum computers. A strong dynamic development is emerging in this area. Of course, it is still in its infancy.

Otherwise, I could imagine that more and more methods will find their way into the direction of climate modeling, which may be about gaining data-driven insights. From this multitude of data that we have available, we try to derive regularities and thus also find new physical laws.

After all, there is this nice saying, "Data is the fuel of the 21st century," and it should be understood in that sense. In summary, I think that the way we do science will continue to change a lot, through new technologies and also through new ways of analyzing data.

You have been involved in research for a very long time. To what extent have you yourself already had such an experience, so that you say "20 to 30 years ago I was dealing with this, and today we're already that far along"?

I see it all the time in computing technology, that is, the progress in computer technology. If I think back to my diploma thesis, where I first came into contact with a mainframe computer, and compare that with the computers my doctoral students are working with today. The acceleration of numerical simulations, the capacity, the data width, and of course the new technologies that have been incorporated. This development is already breathtaking.

I would like to touch on one last point. What would you describe as your greatest success?

The greatest success? That's really hard to say. I mean, you can use prizes or awards, of course, but I wouldn't necessarily call those the greatest success for me. What's nice and exciting about my work is that I get to work with young dedicated people, teach them something, and together we solve scientific problems. That drives me and can be considered a success in my work. That is what makes the scientific profession so nice. You have the freedom to choose your research topic, try to push the research forward and get other people excited about it or get excited by others about something new. If you can and are allowed to do that for years, it's even nicer than prizes. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

See also: Prestigious EU funding for TU Ilmenau: Artificial intelligence to study solar turbulence