LIFD John Fox Annual Lecture 2022

Schedule: 2nd March 2022, Leeds, IN PERSON EVENT.

4.30-5.30pm Fran Morris, University of Leeds “Interactions between mesoscale and synoptic-scale circulation in convection-permitting simulations over West Africa” and Foteini Zagklavara, University of Leeds “Optimising Polymerase Chain Reaction microfluidic flow systems”

5.30-6.00pm Drinks reception

6.00-7.00pm Keynote talk, Dr Sylvain Laizet, Imperial College London

Keynote Title:

High-order finite differences, an immersed boundary method, a Cartesian mesh, pencils, Fortran and a zest of artificial dissipation: a successful cocktail to study turbulent flows on supercomputers

Keynote Abstract:

With recent impressive developments in computer technology, High Performance Computing (HPC) is currently transitioning to the exascale era (systems capable of at least one exaflop or a billion billion calculations per second), with far-reaching consequences for scientific research. HPC has allowed Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to become a critical complement to experiments and theories in order to better understand and manipulate turbulent flows to the benefit of society. Many of the environmental and energy-related issues we face today cannot possibly be tackled without a better understanding of turbulent flows.

While the Navier-Stokes equations constitute a broadly accepted mathematical model to describe the motions of a turbulent flow, their solutions can be extremely challenging to obtain due to the chaotic and inherently multi-scale nature of turbulence. In this lecture, we will introduce an open-source framework called Xcompact3d, dedicated to the study of turbulent flows on HPC systems. Based on high-order finite-difference schemes on a Cartesian mesh, it combines accuracy, efficiency, versatility, and scalability. Active flow control solutions for wall-bounded flows, free-shear flows and wind turbines will be presented to highlight the potential of the Xcompact3d framework.

Keynote Bio:

Sylvain Laizet is a reader in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London (ICL). He holds a PhD and a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches from the University of Poitiers in France in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applied to turbulence. Understanding turbulent flows and how to manipulate them in various engineering applications is the motivation behind his research. With his collaborators at Imperial College, in France and in Brazil, he has developed over the years high-order finite-difference highly scalable flow solvers dedicated to the study turbulent flows. Within the turbulence simulation group at ICL, he is currently investigating wake-to-wake interactions in wind farms, Bayesian optimisation techniques for drag reduction and energy saving, active control solutions for free-shear flows, immersed boundary methods for moving objects, neural networks applied to CFD and particle-laden gravity currents.