Bram van Leer
| Bram van Leer | |
|---|---|
Prof. van Leer at Aerospace Engineering building FXB at University of Michigan
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| Born | Netherlands East-Indies |
| Alma mater | Leiden State University |
| Known for | MUSCL scheme |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields |
CFD Fluid dynamics Numerical Analysis |
| Institutions | University of Michigan |
| Doctoral advisor | Hendrik C. van de Hulst |
Bram van Leer is Arthur B. Modine Emeritus Professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. He specializes in Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), fluid dynamics, and numerical analysis, fields on which he has had a substantial influence.
An astrophysicist by education, van Leer made seminal contributions to CFD in his 5-part article series “Towards the Ultimate Conservative Difference Scheme (1972-1979),” where he extended Godunov’s finite-volume scheme to the second order (MUSCL), developed nonoscillatory interpolation using limiters, an approximate Riemann solver, and Discontinuous-Galerkin schemes for unsteady advection. Since joining the University of Michigan’s Aerospace Engineering Department (1986) he has worked on convergence acceleration by local preconditioning and multigrid relaxation for Euler and Navier-Stokes problems, unsteady adaptive grids, space-environment modeling, atmospheric flow modeling, extended hydrodynamics for rarefied flows, and Discontinuous Galerkin methods. He retired in 2012.
Throughout his career, van Leer has crossed interdisciplinary boundaries to export state-of-the-art CFD technology. Starting from astrophysics, he first made an impact on weapons research, followed by aeronautics, then space-weather modeling, atmospheric modeling, surface-water modeling and automotive engine modeling, to name the most important fields.
van Leer is also an accomplished musician, playing the piano at the age of 5 and composing at 7. His musical education includes two years at the Royal Conservatory for Music of The Hague, NL. As a pianist he was featured in the Winter '96 issue of Michigan Engineering (Engineering and the Arts); as a carillonist he has played the carillon of the Central Campus Burton Tower on many football Saturdays.
He was the world's first and only cj (carillon-jockey), based on the North Campus Lurie Tower. In 1993 he gave a full-hour recital on the carillon of the City Hall in Leiden, the town where he studied for many years. van Leer prefers to improvise in the Dutch carillon-playing style; one of his improvisations is included on a 1998 CD featuring both UM carillons. His carillon composition "Lament" was published in the UM School of Music's carillon music series on the occasion of the Annual Congress of the Guild of Carilloneurs in North America, Ann Arbor, June 2002. A flute composition by van Leer was performed twice in 1997 by University of Michigan Professor Leone Buyse.
Bram van Leer was a doctoral student in astrophysics at Leiden Observatory (1966–70) when he got interested in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for the sake of solving cosmic flow problems. His first major result in CFD was the formulation of the upwind numerical flux function for a hyperbolic system of conservation laws:
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