Computational Sciences for Energy Research PhD programme @FOMarchive

Uploaded October 2016 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago

In 2012, Shell, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) started the CSER PhD programme. As part of this programme, 75 PhD students from India will conduct research in the field of computational sciences in the Netherlands.

The programme 'Computational Sciences for Energy Research' (CSER) is a public-private partnership initiative of Shell, NWO and FOM. The aim of the programme is to make a sustainable science-wide investment in computational sciences in the Netherlands. Within the CSER initiative, Shell is funding 75 PhD places in the Netherlands for computational sciences. NWO and FOM are investing in the Dutch knowledge infrastructure via CSER. A tenure-track programme is part of that investment, just like the research programmes 'CO2-neutral fuels' and 'Uncertainty reduction in smart energy systems'.

Various NWO divisions are involved in the CSER initiative: FOM, Physical Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Social Sciences, Earth and Life Sciences and Technology Foundation STW. This collaboration across a range of computational science disciplines is uniquely positioned to give a long-term boost to the field of CSER. The combined Shell-NWO/FOM initiative will also lead to a further strengthening of the relation between Dutch and Indian research communities. An important driver for Shell to invest in this initiative is to use the programme as a recruitment pool for computational scientists for its technology centre in Bangalore, India.

Computational Sciences for Energy Research PhD programme

$Physics@Veldhoven 2017 – Masterclass Elisabeth Bouchaud Prior to Physics@Veldhoven 2017, the programme committee organised four masterclasses. These classes offer PhDs and young postdocs a unique opportunity to receive an introduction to their discipline from top researchers. Masterclass abstract: Fracture of heterogeneous media To establish a quantitative interrelation between the microstructure of a material and its mechanical properties has been a long term goal in materials science, since the macroscale mechanical response is controlled, to a large extent, by the structure at a relatively fine scale. Although considerable progress has been made in the prediction of elastic moduli, little is yet understood when it comes to the stress or the elongation to failure, or to the fracture toughness (ability to resist the propagation of a pre-existing crack). The difficulty resides in the fact that, close to the crack tip, the heterogeneous material cannot be simply replaced by an effective equivalent homogeneous material, mainly for two reasons: (i) there are very strong stress and strain gradients in the vicinity of a crack tip, which makes it very difficult to perform averages and (ii) the most brittle components of the heterogeneous medium are likely to break first, hence the statistics is controlled by rare events, which makes the problem both conceptually and experimentally challenging. In order to circumvent these intrinsic difficulties, we have tried to establish simple models able to predict, a minima, two consequences of disorder: the roughness of fracture surfaces, and the intermittency of crack propagation. Experiments indeed show that fracture surfaces are self-affine, scale-invariant structures, characterized by Hurst (or roughness) exponents. Crack dynamics also involves power-law distributions (local velocities, waiting times etc.). Considering that crack fronts are slightly distorted by the presence of microstructural obstacles with contrasted toughness, we have suggested models which consider the propagation of an elastic line through an array of randomly distributed obstacles. These models depict in fact the vicinity of a dynamic phase transition, the so-called depinning transition. It will be shown that these models are actually applicable in the linear elastic case, i.e. at large enough length scales. At smaller scales, i.e. at scales where, due to the presence of dissipative processes such as plasticity, microcracking etc., a departure from linear elasticity is observed, no such model is available. However, experiments performed on very different materials in very different conditions, show that this small scale behaviour also constitutes a universality class. Recent experiments and simulations may open the way to further modelling in this complex regime. About the conference: Physics@Veldhoven is a large congress that provides a topical overview of physics in the Netherlands. It is organised by NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research , and takes place each year in January. Traditionally, young researchers are given the chance to present themselves and their work alongside renowned names from the Dutch and international physics community. The programme covers Light and matter, Atomic, molecular and optical physics, Nanoscience and nanotechnology, Statistical physics and Soft condensed matter, Surfaces and interfaces, Physics of fluids, Subatomic physics, Plasma and fusion physics, and Strongly correlated systems.$

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