Work has already been done by the aviation industry to lessen the noise impact of aircraft, including the development of serrated engine jet nozzles, which feature in some of the latest passenger aircraft such as Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The engine’s serrated edges create small, unsteady pockets of air called vortical structures, which break up the larger air parcels being forced out of the jet engine. This process disrupts the engine noise, making the planes quieter.
Using PyFR Computational Fluid Dynamics software, the Imperial researchers have developed computer models which enabled them to visualise the vortical structures created by the serrated jet nozzles in great detail. The models are helping the researchers and their industrial collaborators - Zenotech, Nvidia, CFMS and Kitware - to interpret and analyse the results of very large aircraft engine simulations. Their work has the potential to accelerate discoveries in the field, ultimately leading to the next generation of even quieter aircraft engines.
However, Dr Vincent says that the applications for the software his team has created for this project could be utilised in areas as diverse as measuring bloodflow to aerodynamics in Formula One. “We want to apply this technology in anger and are looking for industry to pick up PyFR and use it in their design processes,” he said.
PyFR is an open source, Pythyon-based framework for solving advection-diffusion type problems on streaming architectures and runs on a range of hardware platforms including heterogeneous multi-node systems, CPU clusters and GPU clusters. “The cross-platform capability of the code is really innovative. It’s never been done before,” Dr Vincent explained.
He continued: “PyFR can also be used ‘in-situ’ to run flow simulations where, instead of recording the information, transferring it on a storage device to another piece of hardware to analyse and send back the changes you needed to make to the model to the original hardware, engineers can use PyFR to create a model, analyse and change information on-the-fly, saving on resources, time and cost.”
According to Dr Vincent, an additional benefit of this technology is its ability to simulate unsteady vortex dominated flows more accurately and efficiently than any current industry standard tool, giving a solution in a shorter period of time. This means companies could avoid having to perform expensive wind tunnel tests or building full-scale mock-ups of their designs which will save money as well.
