Makoto Ueki: MMD's and Aalto University's emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration offered invaluable lessons for my future career

Makoto Ueki is currently doing his Master's at the University of Oxford. In 2023, he completed his summer internship in the Multifunctional Materials Design research group (Aalto University School of Chemical Engineering). He shared with us more details about the summer project and his experience as part of the group.

"I worked on a project concerning the acoustic absorption of a porous material developed within the MMD group. To understand its acoustic properties, I integrated computational fluid dynamics simulations, image processing, and experimental acoustic characterization of the material. My project posed two main challenges: identifying relevant parameters and constructing a simplified model of the material.

Firstly, the theory to characterize sound absorption involved numerous parameters to adjust, making it challenging to gain a comprehensive insight. To address this issue, I used experimental acoustic characterization of the samples, through which I discovered that two parameters were particularly significant.

Secondly, modelling the material was challenging. The material itself was complex, with pores of varying sizes. To run the fluid dynamics simulations, I had to simplify some aspects of this complexity. As a result, I managed to develop a model that is easy to interpret and that explains the trends of the two aforementioned parameters.