Speaker
Prof.
Spencer Sherwin
(Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London)
Description
The use of computational tools in industrial flow simulations is well established. As engineering design continues to evolve and become ever more complex there is an increasing demand for more accurate transient flow simulations. It can, using existing methods, be extremely costly in computational terms to achieve sufficient accuracy in these simulations. Accordingly, advanced engineering industries, such as the F1 industry, is looking to academia to develop the next generation of techniques which may provide a mechanism for more accurate simulations without excessive increases in cost.
Currently, the most established methods for industrial flow simulations, including F1, are based upon the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations which are at the heart of most commercial codes. There is naturally an implicit assumption in this approach of a steady state solution. In practice, however, many industrial problems involve unsteady or transient flows which the RANS techniques are not well equipped to deal with. In order to therefore address increasing demand for more physical models in engineering design, commercial codes do include unsteady extensions such as URANS (Unsteady RANS), and Direct Eddy Simulation (DES). Unfortunately even on high performance computing facilities these types of computational models require significantly more execution time which, to date, has not been matched with a corresponding increase in accuracy of a level sufficient to justify this costs. Particularly when considering the computing restrictions the F1 rules impose on the race car design.
Alternative transient simulation techniques have been developed within research and academic communities over the past few decades. These methods have generally been applied to more academic transient flow simulations with a significantly reduced level of turbulence modelling. As the industrial demand for transient simulations becomes greater and the computer "power per $" improves, alternative computational techniques, not yet widely adopted by industry, are likely to provide a more cost effective tool from the perspective of computational time for a high level of accuracy.
In this presentation we will outline the demands imposed on computational aerodynamics within the highly competitive F1 race car design and discuss the next generation of transient flow modelling that the industry is looking to impact on this design cycle.
Prof. Spencer Sherwin
Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London
Spencer Sherwin is the McLaren Racing/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London. He received his MSE and PhD from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Princeton University. During his time at Imperial he has maintained a successful research program into the development and application of the high order spectral/hp element techniques with particular application to separated unsteady aerodynamics, biomedical flow and understanding flow physics through instability analysis.
Professor Sherwin’s research group (www.sherwinlab.info) also develops and distributes the openware spectral/hp element package Nektar++ (www.nektar.info) which has been applied to direct numerical simulation and stability analysis to a range of applications including vortex flows of relevance to offshore engineering and vehicle aerodynamics and biomedical flows associated with arterial atherosclerosis. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed papers in international journals covering topics from numerical analysis to applied and fundamental fluid mechanics and co authored a highly cited book on the spectral/hp element method. Currently he is an associate director of the EPSRC/Airbus funded Laminar Flow Control Centre and is the chair of the EPSRC Platform for Research in Simulation Methods (PRISM) at Imperial College London (www.prism.ac.uk).
