On this page, you can find a handful of the projects that I’ve worked on over the years, mostly related to coding or physics. Feel free to contact me if you want more information about anything listed here.
Eilmer4 Equilibrium Flow Module
A Program to Calculate Equilibrium Concentration of a Well-Mixed Chemical System
Prepared as a part of my engineering Honour’s thesis, this project focused on building a program to determine the equilibrium state of a well-mixed chemical system. With prototypes written in ‘Python’, and a final project written in ‘D’, the end goal was to create a solver that could be readily integrated into UQ’s computational fluid dynamics program “Eilmer4”.
Two approaches were considered: a ‘stoichiometric’ solver that didn’t pan out past the prototype stage, and a fully functional ‘non-stoichiometric’ solver that was carried through to completion. You can find the complete project report/documentation here project report/documentation here or jump straight to the code here:
OzDes Visualization
Visualizing Supernovae Occurences & Estimates of Weak Gravitational Lensing
As a part of a research assistant position at the University of Queensland’s cosmology department, I took a look at two different areas that could help visualize the (then recent) OzDes deep space survey data: Extending an existing visualizer of galaxy locations to animate supernovae, and examining the link between galaxy density and weak gravitational lensing in observations of these same supernovae.
An overview of the entire project can be found here.
AGN Reverberation Mapping
Program for Stochastic Light Curve Recovery From AGN’s
By estimating the delays between different signals that are produced by an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), we can in turn estimate the size and mass of the system. This “reverberation mapping” is a difficult area to break into, especially for newcomers for whom even the fundamental concepts may be unfamiliar. In this project, I’ve covered two main areas:
- Creating a python-based recreation of “Javelin“, a popular lag-estimation program
- Writing detailed step-by-step walk-throughs of the underlying theory, to help ease newcomers into the field
You can find the written portions of the project here:
- A general introduction to Gaussian statistics
- A more specific application to AGN reverberation mapping (Still Under Revision)
- Derivations of the transfer damped random walk response’s correlation functions
If you’re hoping to take a look at the python prototype I’ve based on this work, feel free to contact me.
International Physics Tournament 2019
Short-Form Projects for the “Physics Olympics”
The International Physics Tournament (IPT) gathers national teams of student physicists from around the world to present their findings on a dozen or so complicated problems that are presented a few months in advance. I was an “at-home” member of the 2019 Australian team, and was entirely responsible for the work on two questions in particular:
- The Droste Effect: How to use the “infinity mirror” effect of a camera pointed at its own monitor to measure the speed of light:
- Magnet Elasticity: What sort of mechanical elasticity a string of magnetic bars have, and how sharp of a radius can be formed if they are bent into a closed loop:
Hugh McDougall 