ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY

Geological processes are generally quite complex and occur under a wide range of thermodynamic conditions. The structure and the properties of crystalline and non-crystalline phases in the Earth’s interior are often not accessible directly and must be investigated by experiments and by numerical simulations. In this project, we use predictive molecular simulation approaches to establish relations between structural properties of relevant phases, in particular oxide and silicate glasses and melts and aqueous fluids, at high temperatures and high pressures and their respective thermodynamic and physical properties.

In nuclear fusion experiments, researchers routinely heat hot gases up to temperatures of 100 million degrees in order to create the conditions needed for energy-producing fusion reactions. Turbulence is one of the main obstacles on the way to sustaining these conditions reliably. A particular challenge is found in the plasma edge, where turbulence is suppressed by a self-organized transport barrier. Researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics have made important progress to understanding the turbulence in this region, leveraging resources provided by the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.

Without its magnetic field, life on Earth’s surface is impossible, since the magnetic field screens us from deadly solar radiation. In order to gain a better understanding of the generation of Earth’s magnetic field and heat flow in the Earth--which is crucial for understanding Earth's history--scientists have performed large scale simulations of crystalline and liquid iron alloys at conditions of Earth’s core, up to 6000K and over 300 million atmospheres of pressure, and have computed the electrical and thermal conductivity. The computationally very intensive first-principles molecular dynamics simulations for fluids required more than 60 million core hours of computing time on SuperMUC.