HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING SUPPORT FOR UNITED KINGDOM CONSORTIUM ON TURBULENT REACTING FLOWS (UKCTRF)

The proposed UK Consortium on Turbulent Reacting Flows will perform high-fidelity computational simulations (i.e. Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes simulations (RANS), Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS)) by utilising national High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to address the challenges related to energy through the fundamental physical understanding and modelling of turbulent reacting flows. Engineering applications range from the formulation of reliable fire-safety measures to the design of energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly internal combustion engines and gas turbines. The consortium will serve as a platform to collaborate and share HPC expertise within the research community and to help UK computational reacting flow research to remain internationally competitive. The proposed research of the consortium is divided into a number of broad work packages, which will be continued throughout the duration of the consortium and which will be reinforced by other Research Council and industrial grants secured by the consortium members. The consortium will also support both externally funded (e.g. EU and industrial) and internal (e.g. university PhD) projects, which do not have dedicated HPC support of their own.
The consortium will not only have huge intellectual impact in terms of fundamental physical understanding and modelling of turbulent reacting flows, but will also have considerable long-term societal impact in terms of energy efficiency and environmental friendliness. Moreover, the cutting edge computational tools developed by the consortium will aid UK based manufacturers (e.g. Rolls Royce and Siemens) to design safe, reliable, energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly combustion devices to exploit the expanding world-wide energy market and boost the UK economy. Last but not least, the proposed collaborative research lays great importance on the development of highly-skilled man-power in the form of Research Associates (RAs) and PhD students of the consortium members, who in turn are expected to contribute positively to the UK economy and UK reacting flow research for many years to come.

The major impacts of this research endeavour are summarised as follows:

Development of fundamental understanding and modelling of turbulent reacting flows
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Much of the benefit of the research activities in the UKCTRF will contribute to all the major modelling methodologies (e.g. flamelets, Conditional Moment Closure and Probability Density Function) of turbulent reacting flows in general. The high-fidelity models developed in the project will lead to accurate prediction from CFD simulations, which can help in the economical design of IC engines and gas turbines for better efficiency and environment friendliness and in the abatement of fire and explosion hazards. This suggests that the findings of this research endeavour will be of particular interest to power plant and automobile sectors of the industry (e.g. Rolls Royce, Siemens and Shell etc.). The research outcomes will be disseminated through participation of the consortium members in international conferences (e.g. International Combustion Symposium, European Combustion Meeting, Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) meeting, ASME Gas Turbine meetings etc.) and their publication in reputed scientific journals (e.g. Combustion and Flame, Physics of Fluids etc.). The research will also be presented by the members in the meetings of the British Combustion Institute and the Institute of Physics to attract attention from the automotive, gas turbine and fire-safety industry in the UK. The DNS and LES databases resulting from the project will be made available to other interested researchers upon request.

IC-engine, gas turbine and fire related applications
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The major beneficiaries of this work are the UK based industries (e.g. Rolls Royce, Shell and Siemens etc.) which are engaged in developing new concepts for designing low-pollution and high efficiency IC engines and gas turbines. Moreover, fire related research in the consortium will minimise the effects of atmospheric chemical pollution, accidental releases, fires and explosions, which in turn will lead to the development of improved fire-safety and reliable fire-resistant structures. The technological advancements of this consortium will also help in designing energy-efficient and environment-friendly combustors especially for the UK based industries (e.g. Rolls Royce, Siemens, Shell etc.), which will also bring a long-term benefit for society. The data will be shared to other UK research groups upon request, and will play a significant role in devising and calibrating new models to carry out high-fidelity RANS/LES simulations. Finally, the CFD software community, who use state-of-the-art combustion RANS/LES models in their codes to yield high-fidelity predictions, will also be interested in this work.

Manpower development
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The proposed project is based on the collaboration between the different turbulent reacting flow research groups in the UK, which will ensure an extensive knowledge exchange between PIs, CI and the PhD students and RAs working in this project. This project will not only broaden the expertise of the investigators but also be highly valuable for the RAs and PhD students for their academic and career development. The RAs and PhD students will receive extensive training on a variety of topics such as advanced thermo-fluid mechanics, turbulence, reduced chemistry, and combustion model development. They will also learn advanced techniques for high performance computing, which will improve their analytical and mathematical skills. This project lays substantial emphasis on the development of both technical and transferable skills of the RAs and PhD students, which, in turn, increases the chances of their employability.