UK Consortium on Mesoscale Engineering Sciences (UKCOMES)

UKCOMES addresses scientific and engineering problems at mesoscales which lie between atomistic and macroscales. Such problems are ubiquitous in, for example, a wide variety of physical, chemical, biological, biomedical, material, pharmaceutical and engineering phenomena and processes. Mesoscale engineering sciences are truly interdisciplinary and cross-cutting, uniting the engineering and science research communities. UKCOMES brings together all the required expertise to make critical theoretical discoveries and translate these new concepts into software that is able to exploit today's and future high-end computing (HEC) developments. The modelling and simulation methodologies are based on non-continuum or discrete approaches, including lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), dissipative particle dynamics (DPD), smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CG-MD). UKCOMES has been funded by the EPSRC (Grant No. EP/L00030X/1, 01/06/2013 - 31/05/2018) for HEC resources. It has also won an award under the EPSRC Computational Science and Engineering Software Flagship Project Call (EP/P022243/1, 06/2017 - 05/2020, HiLeMMS, £513,863). The expanded UKCOMES will capitalize on its successes to lead the research field in the world and to deliver both academic and end-user impact.

The research of UKCOMES has a natural alignment with many of EPSRC's priority areas including energy, sustainability, environment engineering, digital economy, healthcare technologies, low-carbon technologies, nanotechnologies, and so on. It also supports the strategic goals of: (a) Software as an Infrastructure of the EPSRC; (b) UK e-infrastructure Strategy for Science and Business of BIS; (c) Shaping Capability, Developing Leaders and Delivering Impact of the EPSRC; and (d) The Royal Academy of Engineering strategy for "Jobs and growth: the importance of engineering skills to the UK economy"

The research will fill a major gap in the understanding and utilization of mesoscale phenomena and processes, and will provide improved modelling tools and the fundamental understanding of mesoscale phenomena to help designers, developers and manufacturers to improve design capabilities and shorten product development cycles, thus benefitting the aeronautical, automotive, chemical, food, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and process industries and strengthening UK's industrial competitiveness overall.

One of the key objectives of UKCOMES is to make LBM more accessible, affordable and capable for industrial applications. By developing open-source codes like DL_MESO and HemeLB, industry can gain access easily without excessive expenses. Already, the current users of DL_MESO work in a wide range of areas that include chemistry, chemical engineering, physics, biology, pharmaceuticals, environmental science, mechanical engineering, materials science, metallurgy and applied mathematics. By extending the technical capabilities further, especially in handling complex geometries and realistic physical parameters, DL_MESO will be much more popular with industrial R & D than it is now. It should also be mentioned that while cutting-edge scientific research using LBM requires HEC, the majority of LBM simulations for industry can be done within hours or at most a couple of days on a standard desktop.

Pilot studies will be conducted jointly with industrial partners Mitsubishi Electric in Livingston, UK and The National Supercomputing Centre (NSC) at Wuxi, China. With Mitsubishi, the capabilities of DL_MESO for HVAC applications will be explored for both prediction and design optimization. With NSC, the main purpose is to test the consortium community codes on new supercomputing architectures so that a wide range of end-users can benefit from these codes. Fund is requested to cover the travel and subsistence as well as other research consumables. The total cost is estimated to be £10,000. Additional funding from the two industrial partners has been secured (see their letters of support).

The project will train one highly skilled postdoc who is directly funded by the grant. More importantly, funding for UKCOMES will help to sustain a research community in the field, in which PhD students and postdocs funded by other sources are trained in a rich and stimulating interdisciplinary environment. By having opportunities to attend technical meetings and workshops, they would also gain vital communication and presentation skills as well as computing skills of HEC. The project will run two open workshops and will invite people from industry and academia to attend. This will provide updated mesoscopic modelling knowledge and new software suites to various end-users.