Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has revolutionised our understanding of turbulent flows, and it has provided the means to develop highly optimised devices for industrial applications.  The School of Engineering has a proud history of CFD research, stretching back over almost 30 years.  The School makes extensive use of ALICE, the University of Leicester’s High Performance Computing Facility.  Our staff expertise in CFD covers a wide range of topics, as outlined below.   Commercial CFD packages including ANSYS FLUENT, and Star-CCM+ are available for industrially-relevant work.  Open source packages including OpenFOAM, and bespoke academic codes are used for academic research.

We welcome enquiries from commercial companies who may be interested in using CFD to solve flow problems.  Please contact Dr James Jewkes for more information.

Staff

• Dr Aldo Rona - Aldo studies unsteady compressible flows of industrial relevance, using state of the art computational fluid dynamics. He has delivered novel aerodynamic solutions for propulsion and power, turbomachinery aerodynamics, and thermal management by convective cooling. He has supported biomedical engineering research in haemodynamics, and of the human airways.

• Dr Andrew McMullan - Andrew is an expert in the use of Large Eddy Simulation to study urban environment pollutant dispersion, indoor ventilation, coherent structures in turbulent shear flows, and turbulent mixing.  He is also interested in combining CFD with Virtual Reality.

• Dr James Jewkes - James has expertise in the application of computational fluid dynamics and optimisation methods to industrial fluid flow and heat transfer problems. He is currently leading an EPSRC-funded project to study the use of bubblers in high-pressure aluminium die-casting.

• Dr Matteo Angelino - Matteo is an expert in thermo-fluid dynamics and aeroacoustics, and specialises in the use of Large Eddy Simulation to solve problems related to aircraft noise, aerodynamics, heat/mass transfer and biofluids.

• Dr Tao Zhang - Tao works on the high-fidelity aerodynamic/acoustic modelling and design optimisation of rotary-wing systems and unconventional rotorcraft configurations, using state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics, computational aero-acoustics, and high-fidelity optimisation methods coupled with adjoint formulations and response surfaces.

• Dr Tom Jelly - Tom has expertise in the Direct Numerical Simulation of transitional and turbulent flows, turbulent flows over rough surfaces, turbulent flows over superhydrophobic surfaces, and Large Eddy Simulation of turbo-machinery flows.

• Dr Zahir Hussain - Zahir researches the use of analytical and computational approaches to fluid mechanics, with a particular interest in understanding transitional and turbulent flows. He is National Lead of the UK Fluids Network (UKFN) Special Interest Group (SIG) on ‘Boundary Layers & Complex Rotating Flows’.