This is a project which is currently making use of HPC facilities at Newcastle University. It is active.
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This project uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations to study complex fluid flow phenomena in Waste-to-Energy filtration systems, with a primary focus on pulse-jet cleaning mechanisms. The research involves transient, multi-physics simulations on large, unstructured meshes to accurately capture flow behaviour, pressure dynamics, and particle–flow interactions within filtration units.
Given the high mesh resolution and time-dependent nature of the simulations, significant computational resources are required for parallel processing, memory management, and solver stability. The HPC facility is used to run these large-scale CFD simulations efficiently, enabling detailed analysis and optimisation of pulse-jet cleaning systems and associated components. Such simulations would not be computationally feasible on standard desktop machines and require access to multi-core, high-memory compute nodes.
This project uses ANSYS Fluent and OpenFOAM as the primary Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solvers for large-scale simulations of transient, multi-physics flow problems in waste-to-energy filtration systems.
Simulations are run in batch mode on the HPC facility using the SLURM workload manager, with jobs configured to leverage parallel CPU resources via MPI-based distributed-memory and shared-memory parallelism, where appropriate. These simulations require high memory capacity and bandwidth due to large mesh sizes and transient solution strategies.
Python is used for pre-processing, automation, and post-processing tasks, including mesh handling, case setup, data extraction, and statistical analysis of simulation outputs. MATLAB is used for numerical analysis, signal processing, and visualisation of transient flow behaviour and system performance metrics.