PhD position

The Acoustics Group of the Department of Information Technology at Ghent University has many years of experience in modeling outdoor sound propagation. Numerical models applied to outdoor sound propagation were mainly FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain), PE approximation in frequency domain and object precise beam tracing. Although these models allow us to study many relevant problems in outdoor propagation, they are too computationally intensive when the 3-dimensional fine structure of the environment becomes important.
The Electromagnetic Group at the same department has many years of experience with boundary element models and more specifically with fast multipole solution methods. These models have proven extremely efficient for particular electromagnetic problems and are quite promising for the above mentioned problems that are hard to solve using the techniques currently used by the Acoustics Group.
We therefore want to start PhD research aimed at adapting the existing electromagnetic FMM models to outdoor sound propagation focusing on a set of particular problems related to our work in several projects in cooperation with other universities and research institutes. This PhD research will be jointly supervised by the developers of the electromagnetic FMM and experts in outdoor sound propagation. This will allow the PhD student to reach very quickly a quality level that compares to the level of other researchers active in the area.
This PhD position is part of a larger project that was granted by Ghent University to a group of researchers with electromagnetic, optic, and acoustic background a couple of years ago. Therefore the PhD work is supposed to start as quickly as possible and the selection procedure can be very fast. The selected candidate will receive a PhD grant for four years and after successful completion obtain a PhD degree from Ghent University, Belgium.