Dr. Anna M. Spagnuolo

Associate Professor of Mathematics
Oakland University, Rochester, MI

My current studies involve numerical analysis, fluid flow in porous media, and a focus on medical applications -- including medical device design/simulation and in-host studies of disease dynamics as well as epidemiology. The mathematical models for the biology problems that I study are derived using systems of PDEs and ODEs.  In regard to the numerical analysis work, I am focused on discovering and using algorithms for solving PDES.  

I am currently working on the NSF-funded project "Collaborative Research:  Hurricane Storm Surge Modeling on Petascale Computers," with the following two Ph.D. students:  Michael DuChene (Engineering) and Daniel Coffield (Mathematics) from Oakland University.  I am the PI on the Oakland University portion.  Dr. Clint Dawson from the University of Texas at Austin is the main PI of the project and Dr. Joannes Westerink is the PI at the University of Notre Dame.  We are working on the speedup of numerical code on Petascale computers for hurricane prediction.s

I was co-PI on an NSF grant for work on "Numerical Speedup Using Flowpaths," where Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) are used to provide a cost-effective way of speeding up existing numerical algorithms and subsets of more general algorithms used within them. For those interested in FPGA's, I recommend taking the short course, "Algorithm Design in the Era of Reconfigurable Computing," offered by Accelogic, LLC, which is funded by an Academic/Non-Profit Grant Program (ANG Program). For more information about Accelogic, LLC and the short course offerings, please see Accelogic, LLC.



I compute using gfortran on ubuntu linux.   Jorge Castro, a ubuntu guru rocks! He introduced me to ubuntu in August 2004. I've been very happy
with ubuntu ever since that time :-)



The following pictures show the transport of a Uranium plume after it leaks into ground water. The plume represents the saturation level of Uranium at the particular time (years). We also see how fractures in the medium could influence the flow pattern. We see here how the plume heads in a diagonal direction due to the geometry of the macroscopic permeability of the rock. This study is joint work with Jim Douglas, Jr and Chieh-Sen Huang.

research

permeability

Below we see a comparison of 2 numerical methods in the computation of the saturation of uranium in ground water. The contour curves give the saturation. We see that the method on the left (MMOCAA) shows that the fluid really covers the region much more than the method on the right (MMOC). This result is clear mathematically, since we can prove that the MMOC "looses" mass in the computation of each time step.

mmocaa

NOTE: In the first saturation plots on this page, a more complicated, locally conservative numerical method was implemented (LCELM). For the problem of interest, there is little difference between the MMOCAA and the LCELM.


SELECT JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS

(with Jim Douglas, Jr. and C.-S. Huang) The approximation of nuclear contaminant transport in porous media, Computational and Applied Mathematics, to appear: (gzipped postscript) lcelmsims or (pdf) lcelmsims.pdf

(with Jim Douglas, Jr.) The transport of nuclear contamination in fractured porous media, Korean J. Math, to appear: (gzipped postscript)dualpormodel or (pdf) dualpormodel.pdf

(with Zhangxin Chen, Richard E. Ewing, and Qiaoyuan Jiang) Error analysis for characteristics-based methods for degenerate parabolic problems (gzipped postscript) degenerate or (pdf) degenerate

(with Zhangxin Chen, Richard E. Ewing, and Qiaoyuan Jiang) Degenerate two-phase incompressible flow V: characteristic finite element methods (gzipped postscript) degenerate2 or (pdf) degenerate2

(with Steve Wright) Derivation of a multiple-porosity model of single-phase flow through a fractured porous medium via recursive homogenization, in Asymptotic Analysis 39, Vol. 2, 2004, pp. 92--112.

(with William Lindsey, Curt J. Chipman, and Fiki Shillor) Numerical simulations of vehicle platform stabilization, 

(with Steve Wright and Peter Shi) Reiterated homogenization and the double-porosity model, with Peter Shi and Steve Wright, Transport in Porous Media, Vol. 59

(with Darrin Hanna, William Lindsey, and Gabrielle A. Stryker) Modeling HIV-1 dynamics and the effects of decreasing activated infected T-cell count by filtration, to appear in Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference of IEEE-EMBS, San Francisco, CA September 1--5, 2004.

The following is work in math/biology. It illustrates the dynamics of Vibrio cholerae in an intestine. This is joint work with  Vic DiRita and Denise Kirschner at the University of Michigan.

Steady-state solutions
Time-Dependent solutions