Olivia Brouillette

I have been working with Dr. Wladimir Lyra on the streaming instability using the Pencil code. My first project was part of a larger collaboration effort to compare the streaming instability across multiple hydrodynamic codes in an unstratified shearing box. The current project I am working on, as part of my planned thesis research, is determining strong clumping in streaming instability simulations based on the parameters given in the dispersion relation rather than the dust-to-gas surface density ratio, which has no physical interpretation. We hope that by using the dust-to-gas volume density ratio instead, we will be able to draw a clear path between the bifurcation seen in the dispersion relation at a dust-to-gas volume density ratio of order unity and what is seen in the simulations for the strong clumping regime of the streaming instability.

I worked with Dr. Jacob B. Simon at Iowa State University, where we worked mainly in computational astrophysics, specifically in planet formation. We used high-performance computing and the Athena code to simulate planetesimal formation. We worked to determine the conditions for planetesimals to form via the streaming instability in a three-dimensional simulation. I focused on two parameters that determine the streaming instability efficiency: grain size and dust-to-gas surface density ratio (Z). Through this project, we aimed to establish conditions for planetesimal formation that were more realistic than previous studies. By varying these two parameters, we were able to determine a critical value of Z for which each grain size can potentially form planetesimals.

I worked in a group, led by Dr. Halil Ceylan, which explored the use of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems to inspect transportation infrastructure. I contributed in inspecting airport runways, aprons, and taxiways using pre-made drone operations, as well as generating 3D spatial data via Agisoft Metashape and ArcGIS Pro using the data.