Development of efficient Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) for contained flows in motor-sport applications

The design and performance of motorsport vehicles relies on key components including the gear box and fuel tank. Achieving optimum power transfer and maintaining engine fuel supply is a very challenging task where the flows occur in extremely complex geometries under rapidly-varying imposed forces and involve gear wheels rotating at many 1000s revolutions per minute generating heat. The accelerations during certain conditions, can be up to five times gravity, are beyond experimental rigs, making computer simulation the only design option. Conventional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is not well suited to simulate the violent hydrodynamics occurring in the engine such as in the gear box due to the complex and generally highly distorted, surface motion. However, few simulation methods can capture the full physics. This PhD will use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). SPH has no computational mesh and is revolutionising engineering simulation being ideal for potentially violent free-surface hydrodynamics where there is strong nonlinearity with highly complex moving geometries. The aim is to develop an efficient SPH model using new ideas for variable resolution with particle splitting & merging. The simulations will be accelerated on graphics processing units (GPUs) as part of our open-source DualSPHysics code.