Research News — Department of Physics — UPC. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Analysis of the last two centuries of rainfall records in Andalusia for the detection of possible changes caused by global warming

As a result of a collaboration with researchers from the University of Córdoba, M. Carmen Casas and Raúl Rodríguez have evaluated the quality of the rainfall data of Andalusia available since 1870, long before the first modern meteorological stations were put into operation, and have analyzed the different rainfall patterns in the region in pursuit of the detection of possible changes caused by global warming

Exploration of synthetic routes to achieve stable clusters as cocatalysts

A collaboration between the groups of Daniel Crespo from the Department of Physics and Jordi Llorca and Lluís Soler from the Department of Chemical Engineering has studied new routes to obtain catalysts from dispersed Pd clusters onto TiO2.

Eduardo Moreno defends his thesis on the modeling of amoeboid cell crawling

Eduardo Moreno Ramos defends his thesis supervised by Sergio Alonso at the Computational biology and Complex System research group on May 30 at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. The thesis, entitled "Computer modeling of the polarity and amoeboid motion of living cells", employs an additional phase field model to couple the biochemical reactions inside the cell with membrane deformations.

Chen Gao defends his thesis on the dynamics and control of artificial satellites in collinear libration environments

Chen Gao defends his thesis co-supervised by Josep J. Masdemont (UPC), Gerard Gómez (UB), Jianping Yuan (NPU) on May 18 at the South Youyi Campus, School of Astronautics of North Western Polytechnical University, China . The thesis, entitled "Dynamics and control for continuous low-thrust spacecraft near collinear libration points", studies the dynamics and control of artificial satellites in collinear libration environments considering weak thrust

The e-ROSITA X-ray observatory detects for the first time the 'fireball' of a stellar explosion

A research team led by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and of which Glòria Sala, a researcher at the UPC Astronomy and Astrophysics Group and the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), is a member, has been able to observe, for the first time, an explosion of X-ray light. The study is featured on the cover of the journal Nature.

Roger Ayats defends his thesis on coherent structures in the transition to turbulence

En Roger Ayats defended his thesis co-directed by l’Alvaro Meseguer and Fernando Mellibovsky on April 22nd at Campus Nord. The thesis, which is entitled "Exact coherent structures in the transitional regime of shear and centrifugal flows", studies the transition mechanisms in shear and centrifugal flows by computing and analysing the role of exact coherent structures.

Qi Liu defends his thesis on GNSS-based Global Ionospheric Maps: real-time combination, time resolution and applications on space weather monitoring

Qi Liu telematically defended his thesis supervised by Professor Manuel Hernández-Pajares on April 14, 2022, entitled "GNSS-based Global Ionospheric Maps: real-time combination, time resolution and applications on space weather monitoring”. The thesis focuses on GIMs including the combination of Global Ionospheric Maps (GIMs) from different centers in real-time, evaluation of real-time GIMs, investigation of the impact of temporal resolution on GIMs, and applications of GIMs on new indices about spatial-temporal components of the VTEC gradient as well as ionospheric storm-scale.