Illinois Institute of Technology's Assistant Professor Scott T. M. Dawson has secured funding from the United States Department of Energy Early Career Research Program for his project on mathematical methods in fluid dynamics. This research aims to enhance energy efficiency in various fields, including aviation and renewable energy.
Dawson's work focuses on predicting coherent features within fluid flows, which can optimize designs across multiple applications such as aircraft, HVAC systems, and wind turbines. "Despite the fact that we now have a lot more computational power than we used to, we’re still somewhat limited in the types of problems that we can very accurately simulate," says Dawson.
The project will test methods on complex or chaotic flow scenarios like rectangular ducts and advanced surfaces with moving fluids. These situations are challenging due to their unsteady and turbulent dynamics. "These problems were chosen because they provide a good test of the methods that we’re developing and also because they’re related to problems of engineering importance," he explains.
For multiscale problems involving large- and small-length scales, current simulations require extensive computational resources. Dawson's approach seeks to streamline this by predicting relevant features in advance, potentially improving calculation speed significantly. "The idea is we can do some preliminary calculations that are cheaper to do on a simplified version of the problem that gives us a starting point for what these functions would be," he states.
He hopes this methodology will reduce computational trade-offs while maintaining high resolution in simulations. "There’s always a trade off... My hope is that we’ll be able to develop methods that don’t have to make as much of an extreme trade off," says Dawson.
The project is funded through the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. "I think that the program gives recipients the opportunity to really spend a good amount of time and resources on working on difficult problems that advance cutting-edge knowledge and methods," Dawson remarks.
Research support was provided under Award Number DE-SC0025597 from the U.S. Department of Energy.