Dr Gerald Muller Dipl.-Ing., Ph,D.
Associate Professor
Dr Gerald Muller is Associate Professor within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton. He is a civil engineer with a broad experience in industry and academia.
Gerald started his professional career with a degree in civil and structural engineering, and worked in industry designing mostly reinforced concrete industrial buildings. From 1989 to 1993 he did a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast on wave induced loadings on shoreline wave power stations. After two years as a postdoc, he joined the academic staff at QUB as a lecturer. He left in 2005 to take up a Senior Lecturer position at the University of Southampton.
His Qualifications are:
(1) Dipl.-Ing. FH Frannkfurt, 1985
(2) MSC Queen’s University Belfast, 1987
(3) Ph.D. Queen’s University Belfast, 1993
His main interests are in the areas of fluid mechanics, renewable energy, and the development of technology for the use of low-grade heat.
His principal achievements over the last years were:
(1) The development – and this includes theoretical and laboratory work plus in some cases the full scale demonstration – of hydropower devices for ultra-low head differences below 2.5 m in 2010.
(2) the coordination of a large EC-financed research project on low head hydropower (Hylow, €3.6M, 2008-2012),
(3) The development of a cost-effective heat engine for the re-use of waste steam and low-grade heat.
(4) The development of an engineering approach to beaver dams in 2016. This led to the recognition that beaver dams, and nature based solutions based on their design principles, provide an inspiration for sustainable water management in arid countries.
(5) The development of a novel heat engine, the condensing engine, for the cost-effective use of low grade temperature thermal energy e.g. from waste steam, waste heat, solar thermal or geothermal energy.
(6) The analysis of energy dissipation mechanisms in aerated flow combining fluid and thermodynamics in 2020. This work introduced thermodynamic effects such as compressible flow into civil engineering hydraulics.
