Peter Rentrop

Peter Rentrop

Peter Rentrop (born  May 3, 1948 in Düsseldorf ) is a German mathematician who primarily deals with numerical mathematics and its applications in science and technology.

academic career

Following his degree in 1974 in mathematics and physics at the University of Cologne , he went to the Technical University of Munich to there in 1977 at Roland Bulirsch on a Taylor series method for the numerical solution of two-point boundary value problems with application to singular problems of nonlinear shell theory to PhD . The habilitation with the title Partitioned Runge-Kutta Method for the Numerical Solution of Rigid and Non-Rigid Initial Value Problems , also at the Faculty of Mathematics at the Technical University of Munich, took place in 1982.

In 1984 he moved from the Technical University of Munich to a professorship at the University of Kaiserslautern , where he worked until 1987. He then returned to the Technical University of Munich for another seven years as a professor at the Institute for Computer Science. In 1994 he accepted an appointment at the Technical University of Darmstadt to set up the Scientific Computing working group in the Department of Mathematics as a full professor. The next station was from 1998 to 2002 the University of Karlsruhe , where he headed the Institute for Scientific Computing (IWRMM). Since 2002 Peter Rentrop has been working again at the Technical University of Munich at the Center for Mathematics, where he holds the chair for M2 Numerical Mathematics.

He also spent longer research stays as a visiting professor at the University of California in San Diego as well as the University of Catania , the University of Geneva and the NTNU Trondheim .

plant

Peter Rentrop's scientific work is characterized by the combination of numerical mathematics with diverse fields of application in science and technology. He is one of the pioneers of scientific computing in Germany. Topics on which he has made important and groundbreaking contributions include

Numerical integration of rigid differential equations: Rigid differential equations are characterized by very different time scales and occur e.g. B. in chemical reaction kinetics and in electrical circuit simulation . Together with Peter Kaps from the University of Innsbruck , Peter Rentrop has developed methods of the Rosenbrock-Wanner type for this purpose, which has led to the powerful algorithms GRK4T and GRK4A, which also perform very well in comparison with the popular BDF methods . Another subject area related to the rigid differential equations is the differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) , with which he mainly dealt in the context of mechanical multi-body systems and circuit simulation .

Alarm model Rhine: This collaboration with the Federal Institute for Hydrology in Koblenz and Gerd Steinebach deals with the flood and poison alarm problem in the river system of the Rhine . For this purpose, simulation software was created over several years, which records essential phenomena such as the transport of pollutants and yet can run on a PC in order to support the necessary decisions with predictions on site in the event of danger.

Turbine design: In cooperation with Siemens AG , Corporate Technology (contact person Utz Wever), procedures for the aerodynamic geometry optimization of turbine blades were developed. These are of crucial importance for the construction of power plants . Efficiency improvements, compliance with pollutant limits and design flexibility make the 3D geometry optimization methods based on fluid sensitivities and the adjoint method a valuable tool for turbine design. Another topic are thermo-acoustic pressure oscillations in the combustion chambers of gas turbines , which are among the greatest disruptive factors for high-performance systems. The development of special location discretizations , problem-specific time integrators and innovations in the field of reaction chemistry led to a highly efficient method for calculating the stability of pressure oscillations.

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Rentrop in the catalog of the German National Library
• Peter Rentrop's website