The fluid research group brings together a large
number of researchers from across the Faculty
of Engineering who are involved in both computational
and experimental research in fluid dynamics.
Application areas are very diverse across
both internal and external flow.
There are a large number of application areas,
it includes things like aircraft, biologically
inspired flows, ocean engineering, atmospheric
modeling as well as flows in and around buildings.
The research of the fluids group is aimed
at improving our understanding and ability
to model the physical world. That means that
we can have a potential impact in a wide range
of areas where fluids flow. So that can range
from things like designing better aircraft
which could lead to reductions in cost and
pollution, we could have impact in things
like better building design which reduce heating
costs, other areas could be predicting volcanic
events and designing better heart valves or
reducing the environmental impact of wind
turbines.
Even things where the way that we model the
fluid flow can be taken into the way that traffic is
modeled. So that actually changes the way
that you might drive around the M25.
The main aim of all the research we do within
the Fluids group is to model real physical
systems be that numerically or be that experimentally.
If we're thinking about mathematical modeling, I
guess the main challenge is that to model
a real fluid flow is numerically expensive
and so we’re always trying to focus our
research on how do we reduce those costs, to
produce something that is actually more useable
for industrial applications. For experimental
testing, the challenge is more if you’re
carrying out an experiment in the lab, how
would you be sure that the data you’re producing is going to reproduce something in the real world that you’re
trying to model. And in both these fields,
there is an overarching challenge of you’re going
to generate huge amounts of data which can become overwhelming and difficult to understand.
And so one of the other research areas is
to think about methods to process that data
in such a way you can extract meaningful information
in a short space of time.
For me the most interesting aspects of my research are always whatever we’re doing at the moment and
I think there is a tendency certainly within
researchers, rather than the subject to be
interesting, that in fact they are just interested people. So I find just about all that I do
is interesting, so it’s always an exciting
thing to work on new things and I think that
is what is interesting is the ‘new’.
It’s more of an applied maths for me, it’s
more of an applied maths subject and I look
at any problem in that way. So I’m always
trying to turn it from the real world into
a mathematical problem, then once I get to that, that’s where I think you become a cross-word
solver where you’re just trying to solve
a smaller problem and then you take that solution
and you turn it back into the real world again.
That’s what we do.
