Research

Water flows and wakes, marine energy and sediment transport

Principal investigator:	Eldad AVITAL
Co-investigator(s):	, , C. Ji, Z. Ikram and X. Bai

Large and Detached Eddy Simulations around a fin (sail) of a submarine (Ikram et al, J. Fluid Eng, 2012)

A diverse programme focusing on challenging water flow problems of significant engineering interest has been developed. This includes:

1. Challenging water wakes studies of breaking waves, where a two-phase LES in-house code has been developed, achieving for the first time stable and accurate simulations for high Froude numbers (above one) for free surface piercing cylinders (Yu. et al, J Fluids Eng 2008, Avital J. Comp Acou. 2009). This was accompanied by the development of DES code coupled with the immersed boundary method to simulate high Reynolds water flows around submerged bodies (Ikarm et al, J. Fluids Eng 2012)

Sediment transport over gravel bed (Ji et al, Phys Fluids, 2013)

2. Sediment transport: High quality DNS and LES simulations of particles convecting in a channel flow, using high performance computing and supported by the EU (Ji et al., Phys. Fluids 2013, Ji et al., Phy. Re. E 2014)

3. Tidal energy: LES computation of a tidal turbine using a combined approach of LES with Discrete Element Method (DEM) to investigate turbulent flow around single and dual rotors and improve computational efficiency of pressure solver and grid resolution carried out with the support of the Royal Academy of Engineering and collaboration with Atlantis Resources Corp (Bai et al, Ren. Energy 2014)

4. Drag reduction: Development of Micro-vortex generator expertise to reduce pressure drag for underwater vehicles with the support of UK dstl.