Capecelatro Research Group Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan

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Jesse Capecelatro Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering Education: Ph.D., Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, 2014 M.S., Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, 2012 M.S., Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado, 2011 B.S., Mechanical Engineering, SUNY Binghamton, 2009 Contact: Office number: 2011 Automotive Lab Phone: (734) 936-2137 Email: jcaps@umich.edu

email | CV

Bio-sketch:
Professor Capecelatro is interested in developing large-scale simulation capabilities for prediction and design of the complex multi-physics and multiphase flows relevant to energy and the environment. To achieve this, his group develops robust and scalable numerical methods to leverage world-class supercomputing resources. His current research projects are focused on adjoint-based methods applied to turbulent combustion, modeling strongly-coupled particle-laden flows, and understanding interactions between electrostatics and turbulence in atmospheric clouds.

Prior to joining the mechanical engineering department at the University of Michigan in 2016, Dr. Capecelatro was a research scientist at the Center for Exascale Simulation of Plasma-coupled Combustion (XPACC) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from SUNY Binghamton in 2009, and two years later completed a M.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he performed research in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on numerical modeling of fluidized bed reactors. In 2014 he received a Ph.D. from Cornell University under the guidance of Prof Olivier Desjardins, where his thesis focused on high performance computing of turbulent multiphase flows. He spent the summer following his Ph.D. as a visiting postdoc at the Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse and École Centrale Paris focusing on fundamental and numerical studies of particle-induced turbulence.

Ali Kord PhD candidate Ali Kord is a 2nd-year PhD student. He holds a Bachelor’s (2012) and a Master’s (2015) degree in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. He worked on drag reduction due to hairy attachments of bodies for his Bachelor’s thesis. He also worked on blood coagulation with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and parallelized his code with GPU for his Master’s degree. Now, he is working towards developing methods for control/optimization of mixing in variable density turbulent flows with the eventual goal of controlling/optimizing turbulent combustion.

Gregory Shallcross PhD candidate Awards: 2017 NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship (NSTRF); 2017 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) Gregory Shallcross is a 2nd-year PhD student. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Virginia where he was involved in bio-inspiration research. His current research interests are in particle-laden turbulent flows and compressible multiphase flow modeling. He is currently developing methods to capture particle fluidization during interplanetary surface plume interactions, which pose serious problems during planetary landing.

Yuan Yao PhD candidate Yuan Yao is a 2nd-year PhD student. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where he has conducted research on microfluid simulations. He also has experience on in-vivo turbulence simulation for drug deposition at UC Berkeley. Currently, he is working on developing efficient methods for computing long-range electrostatic forces in electrically-charged particle-laden flows, in addition to reduced-order modeling of droplet combustion.

Sarah Beetham PhD candidate Awards: 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP); 2016-2017 MICDE Fellowship Sarah Beetham is a 2nd-year PhD student. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan where she was involved in computational modeling of biological phenomenon related to solid mechanics. She also obtained an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southampton, UK, through support of the Roger M. Jones Fellowship. She spent 6 years in the automotive industry, working in powertrain calibration at General Motors and side impact airbag design at Nissan Technical Center. Her current research interests are in particle-laden turbulent flows and data-driven modeling.

Arun Ashok Rao MS student Arun Ashok Rao is a first year Masters student. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal. He has worked on the numerical estimation of quenching heat flux using Inverse Heat Transfer at Universitӓt Bremen. He is currently working on Euler-Lagrange models that can describe the erosion and pattern formation in large subaqueous sediment beds.

Lei Guo MS student Lei Guo is a first year Masters student. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Energy & Power Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University. His past research involved heat transfer of condensing and liquid metal flow. He is currently working on numerical modeling of heat transfer in gas-solid turbulent flows.

Qingquan (Megan) Wang MS student Qingquan (Megan) Wang is a first year Masters student. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Mechanics and Astronautics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison where she was involved in nuclear software development research. Her current research interest is GPU accelerated fluid particle simulation. She is currently researching on developing parallelization of particle and fluid computation in Euler-Lagrangian frame with OpenACC directives on heterogeneous cores.

Undergraduate students at Michigan interested in research related to fluid dynamics and high-performance computing can email me about available positions.

No funded post-doctoral positions are available at the moment, although applications are always welcome.

To be eligible to join our lab, students must first be admitted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan, typically in the graduate fields of Mechanical Engineering (though other fields will also be considered). Information on the Mechanical Engineering program can be found here. Note that the admission deadlines are typically in late December, and that applications outside of the regular cycle are not considered for admission. While interested candidates not yet admitted to the UM Ph.D. program are welcome to contact Prof. Capecelatro by email, note that an answer is unlikely due to the large number of sollicitations.