Specialist facilities
The Group has available state-of-the-art rigs and experimental facilities including boiling and condensation rigs, up-to-date measuring facilities including two high-speed, high-resolution cameras for flow visualization and equipment for detailed surface structure analysis. It is supported by the Manufacturing Group, in producing specially designed surfaces for heat transfer enhancement. This development is informed by the Group’s unique expertise in surface-fluid interactions based on novel fundamental work by the members on the effect of surface topology and fluid properties on two-phase heat transfer. This is important both, in large traditional systems used in the refrigeration, power and process industries as well as at the micro-scale in thermal management systems designed by the Group for cooling of electronics.
Advanced numerical investigations are possible through our free institutional access to the UK National Tier 2 High Performance Computing Hub “Young” plus the availability of a College computing cluster and high-performance PCs for individual research projects.
Experiments are carried out in our dedicated lab-scale fixed-bed reactors to study the mass transfer behaviour. Techno-economic analysis of the processes are also carried out via process modelling/simulation and optimisation. Colleagues work with Large Eddy Simulation methods in a range of applications including cooling of electronic equipment, turbomachinery, avionics and aeroacoustic flows. These include turbulent heat transfer, discretisation and coupling of multi-fidelity, multi-scale systems. High Performance Computing is used for predictive simulation and analysis of unsteady datasets to reveal flow mechanisms. Our work in modelling also includes advanced numerical methods in single and two-phase flows- both, in boiling and condensation systems.