Mechanical engineer probing complexities of climate, other chaotic systems

Virginia Tech College of Engineering researcher Mark Paul has received a $400,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award to support his research on the dynamics of large,... Click here for more information.

Blacksburg, Va. — Understanding the dynamics of large, chaotic systems, such as weather and climate, is the goal of Virginia Tech College of Engineering researcher Mark Paul, who has received a $400,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award to support his research.

The five-year CAREER grant awarded to Paul, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, is the NSF’s most prestigious award for creative junior faculty considered to be future leaders in their academic fields.

“Despite their importance in many areas of engineering and science, nonequilibrium systems—systems driven out of equilibrium—remain difficult to analyze, control, design, and predict,” Paul said.

Examples of nonequilibrium systems include weather and climate, the efficiency of combustion and chemical reactions, the convection of biological organisms in the oceans, heart dynamics, crystal growth from a melt, and fluid turbulence.

The difficulty in understanding these systems arises because of the complex way that their spatiotemporal patterns (variations in both space and time) affect the transport of energy and matter, Paul said. A particular challenge is to understand spatiotemporal chaos, a commonly observed behavior of nonequilibrium systems in which properties of the systems evolve chaotically in space and time.