Title: Building a numerical virtual platform for evaluating flexible
floating photovoltaic panels

In this internship, the objective is to build up an efficient numerical platform 
for virtually assessing the thin-film floating PV panels in terms of the 
structure’s response under the water wave excitation, which is essentially a 
fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem. The free-surface flow shall be 
modeled 
using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) by means of an open-source software 
named OpenLB [2]. The thin-film will be simulated with the corotational finite 
element 
method (FEM), which is to be coupled with LBM via the immersed boundary method 
(IBM) [3][4][5][6] developed within the research group in LHEEA since almost ten 
years.

For more details, please refer to:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mtech-hoe_internship-on-numerical-simulation-of-
fsi-activity-7270335504250765312-0krp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Period: From March to August in 2025

Salary: about 600 euros per month

Requirement: the candidate should already have a M1-Master level, i.e. this is 
M2-Master thesis

References:
[1] Where Sun Meets Water: Floating Solar Market Report. World Bank, Washington, 
ESMAP 2019.
[2] A. Kummerländer, T. Bingert, F. Bukreev, et al. OpenLB Release 1.7: Open 
Source Lattice Boltzmann Code. Version 1.7. Feb. 2024.
[3] Z. Li, J. Favier, U. D’Ortona, et al. An immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann 
method for single- and multi-component fluid flows. Journal of Computational 
Physics 304: 424-440, 2016.
[4] Z. Li, W. Cao, D. Le Touzé. On the coupling of a direct-forcing immersed 
boundary method and the regularized lattice Boltzmann method for fluid-structure 
interaction. Computers & Fluids 190: 470-484, 2019.
[5] Z. Li, G. Oger, D. Le Touzé. A partitioned framework for coupling LBM and 
FEM through an implicit IBM allowing non-conforming time-steps: application to 
fluid-
structure interaction in biomechanics. Journal of Computational Physics 449: 
110786, 2022.
[6] Z. Li, X.R. Huang, L. Fang. Numerical modeling of fluid–structure–
piezoelectric interaction for energy harvesting. Computer Methods in Applied 
Mechanics and 
Engineering 414: 116164, 2023.