Faculty Profile

Zahra Lakdawala completed her doctoral studies from the Department of Mathematics of the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in 2010. Her PhD work was motivated by an industrial-driven investigation for numerical simulation of automotive filters- extending the methodology for computational fluid dynamics for coupled plain and porous media. After her PhD, she has worked at Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics,  DHI-WASY GmbH and Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics. She has also spent her time as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and ETH Zurich.

Her research focuses on numerical methods for partial differential equations and for integro-differential equations (finite volume, finite difference, and finite element discretization), computational fluid dynamics (space and time discretization and iterative (krylov subspace) methods, algebraic multigrid solvers), numerical simulation of (Newtonian) flow and (contamination) transport in plain and (rigid, poro-elastic) porous media.

She is interested in modelling and simulation of multi-scale and multi-physics processes (upscaling for flow in porous media, effective properties of composite materials, coupling micro- and macro-scale filtration simulations, handling large scale models, (stochastic) modeling of groundwater management, parameter identification, incorporating uncertainty with time constraints, stochastic kriging, calibrated modeling and software development. She has worked on including uncertainty quantification into the FEFLOW software for subsurface hydrogeological applications to reduce uncertainties in the quantity of interest based on the
collection of new data or on better physical understanding.

The application areas for her works are as follows:

• filtration and separation for efficient filter design
• modeling flow and uptake of diapers
• water resource management

Her work is successfully integrated in the form of integrated softwares in production lines of an automotive filter manufacturing industry and diaper manufacturing industry, namely IBS Filtran GmbH and Procter & Gamble GmbH (in Germany).

Further, her work is included in parts in the commercial softwares, namely  FiltEST and FEFLOW.

"Give me a system of partial differential equations, and i will churn them into a numerical software"