About:
The next KE Hub online Triage Workshop will be presented by Vanellus.
Reduced-order fluid and thermal modelling for Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces
Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TMPS) have found applications in high-performance heat exchangers, where engineers want to maximise the surface area to volume ratio to get the best heat transfer performance. These types of designs have only recently become feasible to manufacture thanks to metal 3D printing. However, their performance is poorly characterised, in large part due to challenges in simulating them.
Traditional methods for simulating heat exchangers (i.e. Computational Fluid Dynamics) involve creating a high-quality mesh for the entire domain and solving PDEs using the finite volume/element method. The problem is, for heat exchangers with thousands of TMPS unit cells, this quickly becomes computationally intractable both to produce the mesh and solve the equations.
We want to explore how we can exploit the periodic structure of these surfaces to create reduced-order models in order to make solving for key quantities such as pressure drop and heat transfer coefficients tractable.
Designing more efficient heat exchangers is vital in a wide range of application areas, such as cooling high-powered GPUs, cooling the batteries of electric cars, and increasing turbomachinery efficiency.
Vanellus are an early stage startup based in Cambridge, where we are developing GPU-accelerated modelling tools for fluid and thermal problems on complex geometries.
Academic mathematical scientists from KE Hub partner university departments are invited to take part in these workshops. If you would like to attend, please contact your local KE Champion to receive the meeting link or get in touch with the organisers, Lauren Hyndman and Diwei Zhou.
KE Hub Triage Workshops are informal discussion sessions where one B.I.G. Partner presents a challenge they are currently facing, with the aim of determining:
- What, if any, mathematical sciences approaches can be used to address the challenge?
- Who from the mathematical sciences community would like to take on the challenge?
- What mechanisms are most appropriate for driving the challenge forward?
The purpose of these workshops is to allow the B.I.G. Partner to engage directly with academic mathematical scientists to probe the scientific content of their proposed challenge. The environment is relaxed and interactive, and we encourage questions, clarifications and discussions throughout. You can find information on all upcoming and past workshops here.