SKShun Kikuchi
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Research

Research

I formulate coupled physical processes as continuum models and study their finite element discretization, nonlinear solution, time integration, and verification as one computational system.

01

Freezing and Thawing of Saturated and Unsaturated Soils

Coupled simulation of heat transfer, liquid water flow, water vapor transport, and water–ice phase change.

  • Coupled heat and moisture transport
  • Unfrozen water and latent heat
  • Nonlinear constitutive relations
  • Verification and validation
02

Artificial Ground Freezing

Numerical evaluation of groundwater flow, freezing-pipe layouts, and internal pipe heat transport on frozen-ground formation.

  • Advective heat transport
  • Freezing-pipe layouts
  • Heat transport inside freezing pipes
  • Representative length and critical velocity
03

Numerical Solvers and Scientific Computing

Development of robust and efficient solution strategies for strongly nonlinear freezing problems.

  • Newton, Picard, and continuation
  • Krylov methods and preconditioning
  • Adaptive time stepping
  • MPI and OpenMP parallelization