The project, led by Ali Thari, involved working on design software used by Rolls-Royce to try to speed up one of two main computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes used by Rolls-Royce. CFD is a method used to evaluate the quality of an aircraft engine design before a prototype is built. The group were looking at improving the performance of the code by at least 25%, whilst ensuring the quality of predictions were not compromised.
The code is aimed at computing air flows full of small liquid droplets and is applicable in other areas such as understanding how the aerosols produced during sneezing contribute to the spreading of diseases such as Covid-19.
For Rolls-Royce, this means that for many design tasks, the time taken to find out the success of the design is 25% less. This also means that there is a 25% reduction in CO2 emissions, running costs, and energy expended. These reductions also mean that product development times are accelerated, and higher quality simulations are possible.
Dr Marco Zedda and Dr Ruud Eggels were also involved in the project via Rolls-Royce.