CWI has been granted two PhD positions in the Shell-NWO programme Computational Sciences in Energy Research. This was announced today by the FOM Foundation.
Daan Crommelin and Bert Zwart will supervise a PhD position in rare event simulation for energy grids. This project will focus on the effects of high fluctuation in supply and demand in energy grids as a result of decentralized power generation from sources such as sun, wind and water.
Willem Hundsdorfer and Ute Ebert will work on a different solution to a similar problem, namely on low resistance electricity networks based on DC transmission that will allow to easily transport and distribute electric energy across continents; the CWI researchers will model and help understand circuit breakers which presently are the bottleneck of such networks.
These grants are among the first 22 of a total of 75 PhD positions in the multi-year Shell-NWO programme. The programme is a joint initiative by NWO, FOM and Shell, executed by FOM within the framework of the Dutch top sectors Energy and Chemistry. 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. The first PhD’s will start in the summer of 2013.
Read more in the official FOM press release
