Ian Pamerleau attends Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Ian Pamerleau received the NASA Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium (PASGC) in the spring to work with Dr. Chen on Conjugate Flow Analysis. Since then, he has been working to understand more and expand on the topic. For the PASGC, Ian had to prepare a poster presentation for the 22nd Annual Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium. There were a total of 172 posters at the event and students from all over the country including Puerto Rico. Students explained their research to peers, graduate students, and professors who are interested, similar to the MathFest Poster Session the department hosts in the Math Majors Lounge.

 Dr. Clark of the Department of Physics and Astronomy here at Pitt had this to say about Ian's Poster:

“Ian Pamerleau presented a poster on his research work with Dr. Ming Chen at the 2019 Duquesne University Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium on Friday, July 26th.  The topic of his poster was “Conjugate Flow Analysis”, and I talked to him at length about his work.  Both his poster, and his presentation of his research were very informative and engaging.”

Ian has provided a brief summary of his reasearch:

"I worked with Dr. Ming Chen this summer to study Conjugate Flow Analysis. We studied traveling waves that propagated through a two-layer fluid that is bounded below by a rigid bottom and allowed to move freely at the surface. We seek conditions between the upstream and downstream (initial and final) states that support solitary waves (which are limited to the same states up- and downstream). The flow must be solitary, i.e. it must conserve mass, momentum and energy. We will find algebraic relations between the two states using dimensionless values like height, density and depth ratio as well as the dimensionless wave speed. We were able to find relations, however, we are now in the  process of simplification and reduction of the expressions."