UK Consortium on Mesoscale Engineering Sciences (UKCOMES)

Understanding and predicting the mesoscopic world is at the forefront of science and engineering research that underpins an emerging technological revolution that will rival the more established micro and nano science and technology in importance. Working in the emergent field of mesoscopic simulation requires a truly multidisciplinary approach that needs to span a wide range of both spatial and temporal scales and necessitates close interaction between researchers in the physical and chemical sciences, mathematics, biology, engineering and computational science. The creation of the UK Consortium on Mesoscopic Engineering Sciences (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) hardware developments. Our work will primarily focus on the further development of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) within the DL_MESO package. The LBM has already demonstrated it is the ideal approach to simulating a broad range of mesoscale applications and UKCOMES will seek to transform the DL_MESO suite into a world-leading software package that will incorporate state-of-the-art algorithms for handling interfacial flows, droplet motion, non-Newtonian fluids, moving boundaries, etc. In addition, the consortium's expertise will ensure DL_MESO will run efficiently on computer platforms with more than 100,000 cores and will be able to embrace GPU technology. The impact of UKCOMES will be felt in the pharmaceutical, chemical, environmental, manufacturing and process industries and so on. Designers, developers and manufacturers will benefit from an enhanced modelling and design capability, e.g. designing future droplet-based micro-fluidic systems, novel ink jet or laser printing, spray drying and micro-encapsulation. In the longer term, the work of UKCOMES will impact simulation tools in a wide range of cognate industries concerned with multiphase, multi-species and non-equilibrium transport physics, including modern materials processing, and chemical and environmental engineering.

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. Research projects conducted within UKCOMES are in collaboration with a variety of companies including Airbus, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Land Rover, Jaguar, TATA Steel, NextLimit, TNO Industrial Technology, EXA and ASML as well as organisations such as the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, CLEANSKY (EC ITD) and EU.

The project will make LBM more accessible, affordable and capable for industrial applications. Industry users can access to the source code 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. Companies that have recently shown interest in DL_MESO include Unilever and the Institute of Materials at Taiwan.

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 on HEC. The project will run three open workshops and will invite people from industry to attend. This will provide updated mesoscopic processing knowledge and new DL_MESO functionality to the industrial user to promote the creative processing and manufacturing.

The DL_MESO code has already achieved a significant international impact through a worldwide network of users. The package has attracted over 440 registered academic users, of which 8% are based in the UK, 25% in mainland Europe and the rest outside of Europe. The proposed development within UKCOMES will significantly expand the code's capabilities for various mesoscale problems, numerical efficiency and flexibility of boundary conditions. The user base of DL_MESO is expected to increase dramatically over the next 5 years and beyond. DL_MESO has the potential to be a general purpose mesoscale modelling code that will be the First Choice of users worldwide.