John Fox Memorial Award Seminar

John Fox Memorial Award Seminar
Wednesday 21 October at 130pm, via Zoom (invite below)

The John Fox Award is awarded annually to a postgraduate research student who is studying any aspect of engineering fluid mechanics in the University. The award is to enable a student to expand their research experience by participating in an activity outside the UK. This year’s award winner Damilola Adekanye will give be giving a seminar on the following topic:

Lattice Boltzmann Method Simulations of Dilute Gravity Currents

In environmental systems the hydrodynamics of flows, such as turbidity currents, interacting with solid boundaries are dependent on the morphodynamics of the substrate. Turbidity currents are underflows driven by the action of gravity on the density difference between ambient fluid and a turbid mixture of fluid and sediment. The flows are non-conservative, as the interstitial fluid is miscible with the ambient fluid, and particulate material is eroded and deposited at the boundaries. An important problem in the numerical modelling of turbidity currents is achieving efficient coupling between the transport of particulate material within a flow, and the processes of aggradation and/or erosion of stationary particulate material from the boundaries. The computational expense of conventional solvers of the Navier-Stokes equations has precluded the study of highly turbulent environmental flows with deformable boundaries. In the present study numerical modelling has been conducted using two in-house lattice Boltzmann method codes, RAFSINE and Virtual-Fluids, both written to run on massively parallel graphics processing units, which can reduce simulation times by up to two orders of magnitude relative to conventional computational fluid dynamics solvers. The John Fox award was used to fund a placement with Prof. Martin Geier at the Institute for Computer-Aided Modelling in Civil Engineering (iRMB), based in the Technical University of Braunschweig. Prof. Geier‘s group have expertise in the formulation of Lattice Boltzmann method models for non-uniform grids, and the development of efficient algorithms and data structures to optimize performance when running on GPUs. Although the aim of the overall project is to model fluid-solid multi-phase flows, the present phase of the study concerns the modelling of saline currents, as a precursor to a turbidity current model. The results of the lattice Boltzmann method simulations show good agreement with published experimental data and high-resolution numerical simulations of saline gravity currents flowing in confined channels. Although further extensions to the model are required to incorporate the effects of erosion and deposition at the boundaries, the computational efficiency of the methodology offers opportunities to challenge conventional modelling assumptions and elucidate the controls on the development of submarine channel systems.

Topic: John Fox Seminar

Time: Oct 21, 2020 01:30 PM London

Join the Zoom meeting.

Meeting ID: 833 0922 7415
Passcode: 857049

If you wish to attend the seminar, please email j.crowley@leeds.ac.uk to be updated should there be any technical issues on the day of the seminar.