HIGH-FIDELITY EDDY-RESOLVING SIMULATIONS ON MULTI-CORE ACCELERATORS FOR MULTI-PHASE FLOWS IN CHEMICAL, ENERGY & TRANSPORT

The use of scale resolving simulations (SRS) for single phase flow applications has already shown dramatic accuracy benefits. The term SRS encompasses methods resolving a greater spectrum of turbulence e.g. large eddy simulation (LES), quasi-direct numerical simulation and hybrid methods e.g. detached eddy simulation (DES). The purpose of this work is to extend these methods for multi-phase applications. The use of SRS for single-phase turbulent flows is an area of fluids mechanics that has been widely studied for the past twenty years but SRS of multi-phase flows remains a very understudied area. The project will develop a massively parallel, high-order, fully implicit (temporal and spatial), multi-phase scale resolving methodology and perform simulations of (1) a representative aero-engine bearing chamber, (2) a representative transmission system gear and (3) a continuous chemical reactor. It will demonstrate the next generation of multi-phase high-fidelity flow simulations. We will exploit novel computing hardware through the extension and use of a state of the art fully implicit parallel library developed at the University of Oxford. The library, which enables 'future proofing' of CFD codes for modern hardware architectures, has been shown to give a 27x speedup on a GPU compared with the Intel Math Kernel Library tri-diagonal solver on a CPU. The research will be led by Dr. Richard Jefferson-Loveday, Assistant Professor in the department of Engineering at Nottingham University. It will be undertaken in collaboration with industrial partners MAHLE Powertrain, Rolls-Royce, ROMAX and GSK.