***CLOSED, as of 27.12.2021****

Applied CFD job in R&D: hydrofoil takeoff & seakeeping.
For fresh EU PHD’s with OpenFOAM skills, marine or aero background, autonomy and courage.

22 nov 2021,

for immediate start or jan 2022

NOTE: Due to subsidy scheme constraints,

this is only for fresh european PHD’s,

as their first permanent job after graduation ! (Former temporary employment like in most post-doc positions, or unrelated day jobs, even permanent, are not a problem.)

DO NOT apply if you don’t have a doctor title, we can’t pay you otherwise.

Hey,

we are a small French/German/Argentine R&D team, developing a freak motorsailor (Meaning a boat, not these sailplanes with an engine!). Technically, but also on the design side, it’s a wildly holistic optimisation.

Being foil assisted in some of the sailing modes, the proofs of concept and the upcoming detail optimization rounds rely on somewhat systemic multiphase sims where various niche problems like planing hull ventilation, surface-piercing foil ventilation, turbulence & boundary layers matters, cavitation risk and substantial local slamming loads have to be kept in check.

State of things is reasonable confidence in a few years of preparatory work with Fine Marine and OpenFoam, mostly on mildly dynamic cases. We run our own cluster, allowing to get results on unsteady 50Mcells cases featuring sub-mm detail within a few days, and could think about beefing it up a bit more.

Ambition now would be to nail the validations for L/D alias power predictions, to get more grip on the « flight dynamics » at takeoff and in waves, to automate things a bit more for better case turnover, to optimize of course, to investigate more dynamic cases and use the results to extend the operational enveloppe of the design. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to run a few tests irl as well, and get into ‘digital twin’-style debugging.

Workstyle:

• Essentially remote and autonomous.
• Occasional irl meetings around South Brittany, Nantes, Paris.
• Perhaps a couple weeks per year in Buenos Aires to connect with the design side of the team.
• We’ll expect you to take responsibility for the whole simulation chain including :
  — Contribution to geometry cleanup
  — Tedious (!) quality meshing
  — Continuous update of the calculation approach vs evolving needs and improvements of OpenFoam
  — Improvement of the automating: scripting, generative input CAD etc
  — Keeping up the 24/7 solving. We don’t typically mean getting up at night but having an alternative case ready when your main project crashes should become a habit to avoid wasting cluster time. And a 10mn late evening glance at convergence trends and a relaunch with slightly adjusted parameters should be in order. (Founder is all too used to these worries and could typically take over when you need real off-time though).
  — Validation
  — Mild postPro/visualization, and some generalization and vulgarization effort
• Depending on background, you’d certainly have a lot to contribute to
  — Hull hydrodynamics
  — Wing and appendage design
  — « Flight » dynamics
  — Propulsion
  — Code, hopefully flowing back into the open-source project and fostering relations and insight.

Funding-related constraints are:

• Fresh european PHD, no permanent job in the field since graduation.
• Resident in France or ok and eligible to move your main residence there.

Requirements:

• Background in Aero, Marine hydrodynamics, Windpower or Propeller design,
• or in the math & code side of RANS CFD.
• Multi-year involvement with turbulent simulations using either
  —- OpenFOAM or
  —- SU2 or
  —- Commercial CFD codes AND whatever loosely documented hardcore open-source engineering soft, preferably having contributed actively.
• English is the written language in the project, and for pretty much all your googling and forum digging.
• Patience needed to handle the poor documentation, quirky usage, constant changes of the codebase. General make-do approach allowing to use community softs (we won’t get back into licensed suites that cost more than your job). Working productively with the various non-experts in a multidisciplinary team may also require good nerves from time to time.

A must for this project:

• A healthy lifestyle: We’ll all need to be on top of our attention.
• Staying clear of the usual tech-bro macho niff impairments when it comes to working with women, and substantial thought about how to reshape the working environment so that it becomes and remains attractive for the ladies. Feminization of staff & product is a core strategic axis in the project (do have a look at our designers job offer in Buenos Aires). There is significant effort going into it and obstacles will be sidelined/eliminated as quickly as we can.
  • (If you happen to be one of the 0.6 % women in the field, obviously we’d be more than happy to hear from you. And you’d start with a tad better chances to branch out into the other threads of the project.)

Nice to have:

• Experience with automated (parametric or « genetic ») optimization
• Experience with adjoint optimization
• Experience with the Grashopper/Rhino ecosystem
• Hacking experience
• International background
• Experience with hydrofoils, or piloting, RC-planes, performance sailing, kitesurfing or similar activities allowing to experience fluid dynamics in a direct and intuitive manner.

Pay range and hours:

• From postDoc levels
• up to ~ 3000 € before taxes / 2300 net for those whose experience allows to be immediately operational.
• Slightly reduced hours, ca 32h/week, to help with the work-life balance and to compensate for the HPC on-call aspect.

Visibility:

• Currently funded for 2 years on the hydrodynamics axis.
• extension past that into prototyping support etc would depend on future sales and financing rounds.

Please apply via the contact form : http://goo.gl/forms/6HUuLvNyGp

DO NOT apply if you don’t have a doctor title, we can’t pay you otherwise.