I am offering final-year projects for third-year BSc and fourth-year MMath students at Durham for the upcoming 2022–23 year.
If you are looking for a visually interesting applied maths project, then maybe one of these projects is for you!
I am very happy to talk you about the projects and possible directions if you would like to get in touch.
Picking a project supervisor is an important task! If we haven’t met yet, you can read about the sort of research I do on my research page; and on the sort of fun things I like to give talks about on my talks page.
Projects run in previous years can be read about in the archive.
MATH3382 (Project III) 2022–23
Project title
Theme park physics
Overview
What is your favourite theme park ride? The tower of terror? The space mountain rollercoaster? The teacups?
Theme park rides offer customers an exciting and exhilarating illusion of danger in a controlled environment. Making rides as thrilling as possible while keeping members of the public safe is the challenge of theme park ride designers.
In this project, we will mathematically model the 3D motion of these rides and consider their effects on the human body.
How we might structure the the project
At the start, we could have something like:
- Using mechanics to model the motion of the tower of terror
- Determining how fast you can spin teacups while keeping control
- Researching what sort of rollercoaster designs currently exist and determining if there are other designs that could work
- Deciding how to represent 3D motion along a path
Prerequisites
This is an applied maths project with its basis in Newtonian mechanics.
You may also have to do a bit of practical coding. You should therefore have some familiarity with Python, but you do not have to be a numerical analysis expert.
Resources
MATH4072 (Project IV) 2022–23
Project title
Non-traditional constitutive laws in fluid mechanics and biology
Overview
If you did Fluid Mechanics III this year, you will remember the general form of the Navier–Stokes equation is
$$\frac{\mathrm{D}u}{\mathrm{D}t} = \boldsymbol{\nabla}\cdot\boldsymbol{\sigma} + \boldsymbol{f}(\boldsymbol{u}).$$
If you did Mathematical Biology III this year, you will remember that many spatial and time-dependent population laws can be written as advection–diffusion equations,
$$\frac{\partial u}{\partial t} = \boldsymbol{\nabla}\cdot\boldsymbol{J} + f(u).$$
In fluid mechanics, the assumption that the fluid is Newtonian led the stress tensor term to become $\mu \nabla^2 \boldsymbol{u}$.
In mathematical biology, the assumption of Fick’s law led the flux term to become $D \nabla^2 u$.
These assumptions are called constitutive laws, and in this project, we’re going to pick some more interesting ones!
For fluid dynamics, this will mean entering the world of non-Newtonian, or viscoelastic fluids: fluids like melted cheese and chocolate with fun elasticity and viscosity properties.
For biology, this will mean entering the world of cross-diffusion in 2D systems and ambush predators—continuing on from the end of the course.
This project can go either way depending on your interests and will serve as an introduction to these interesting, and mathematically related, areas.
This project will enjoy some informal joint supervision with Andrew Krause.
How we might structure the the project
At the start, you could have something like:
- Introduction to fluids and biological systems with different constitutive laws
- For the fluids: Introduction to different methods of measuring viscosity and elasticity (rheometry)
- For the fluids: Solving flow in a simple geometry (e.g. a pipe) for a non-Newtonian fluid
- For the biology: Understanding how porous media changes the structure of travelling waves and pattern formation
- For the biology: Studying how models of directed motion give more realistic (but more difficult!) representations of animal migration
Prerequisites
You need to have taken Fluid Mechanics III (for the fluids part) or Mathematical Biology III (for the maths bio part) to do this project. Ideally you will have taken both.
This is an applied maths project and there will be some computational work as well as some analytical work. You should be competent with Python, but you do not have to be a numerical analysis expert.