New research from UBC Okanagan will lead to reduced fuel costs in commercial aviation and wastewater treatment systems.
Using advanced computer modelling, researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus and collaborators at the Universitat Politecnica a Valencia (Technical University of Valencia) in Spain are now better equipped to understand how air flowing over an airplane’s wings or water flowing through pipes in a wastewater treatment facility devolve from a chaotic, turbulent condition to an organized condition. Understanding these processes can significantly decrease the aircraft fuel costs or the maintenance and operating costs of the wastewater treatment facility.
This collaboration began nearly a year ago, as UBC sent a PhD. student from the UBC Okanagan Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab to work with Spanish computational turbulence expert Professor Sergio Hoyas. “We are excited to join UBC Okanagan in this endeavour” says Hoyas, “and we are looking forward to uncovering some very tangible results.”
“The opportunity to collaborate with Universitat Politecnica a Valencia is exciting” says Joshua Brinkerhoff, who heads the Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab. Brinkerhoff has been researching the complexities of turbulent flows for over a decade and feels these latest findings open up new avenues towards understanding how turbulent flows behave.
The group’s preliminary findings will be presented at the 70th Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting of the American Physics Society in November.