Wind tunnels for fluid dynamics boffins among UKRI's £72M funding
- Reference: 1687776311
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/06/26/ukri_research_funds/
- Source link:
The agency has targeted four different projects, including building 11 wind tunnels and upgrading existing facilities for £23 million ($29 million). Wind tunnels are massive tubes covered in channels for air to blow through, and are designed to mimic the flight conditions to test objects like aircraft, spacecraft, or rockets.
In general, they allow engineers to study fluid dynamics, the flow of liquids and gases, so they can develop detailed models and simulations of other types of hardware or materials too. The agency believes that the new wind tunnels will boost the UK's ability to explore new technologies for green energy, transport, and healthcare.
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The majority of the funding – £34 million ($43 million) – will go towards building BioFAIR, a digital platform for biological and biomedical research. BioFAIR will act as a central repository for data processing and analysis so scientists can better access resources needed to collaborate, build upon, or replicate experiments.
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The remaining £6.8 million ($8.6 million) and £8 million ($10 million) will be spent on building the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and next-generation gravitational waves detectors.
Under construction in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the ELT will be the largest ground-based observatory operating at infrared and optical wavelengths. The UK is one of 16 countries helping fund the project, and has been tasked with developing and implementing the full instrumentation suite for the telescope capable of capturing astronomical objects in more detail than the Hubble Space Telescope.
[4]IR35 costs UK Research and Innovation £36M – the same it spent funding tech projects
[5]Academics tell Brit MPs to check the software used when considering reproducibility in science and tech research
[6]Britain publishes 10-year National Artificial Intelligence Strategy
[7]UKRI denies pulling funding from Newport Wafer Fab over Chinese ownership concerns
Finally, UKRI will fund the design of physical instruments and computational infrastructure to detect gravitational waves at higher resolution. Gravitational waves require sensitive apparatus capable of observing the tiniest distortions of laser light caused by ripples spread throughout the universe from violent cosmic events like the collision of black holes or exploding supernovae.
Mark Thomson, Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council and UKRI's Champion for Infrastructure, [8]said in a statement: "Scientists working on research from life sciences to aircraft safety depend on access to the most advanced equipment and facilities.
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"This £72 million investment in the UK's research and innovation infrastructure will ensure the UK is at the forefront of scientific discovery. It will support our scientists in responding to major global challenges including net zero and food security.
"Five years on from the publication of UKRI's Infrastructure Roadmap, this shows how we are taking a strategic approach to identifying the facilities the UK needs and how to support them." ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZJm2HesgD62FgKj@g2Kn@gAAAkU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/ukri_ir35_bill/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/25/research_software_inquiry/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/22/uk_10_year_national_ai_strategy/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/23/ukri_denies_newport_wafer_fab_fund_issue/
[8] https://www.ukri.org/news/ukri-invests-72-million-upgrading-uk-research-infrastructure/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZJm2HesgD62FgKj@g2Kn@gAAAkU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Jeez
What are these people smoking??
If you want them to be able to give more, persuade the Government to increase their budget..
Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?
Do they really need that many to develop simulation models? The whole ideas of using sims is to reduce dev time and costs, Shirley?
Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?
Computational Fluid Dynamics is still very much a work in progress. The underlying equations, Navier-stokes, are not fully solvable, so we're stuck with approximations and simplifications. Some flow regions can be better simulated than others, but turbulence and flow separation are still a massive problem to predict accurately. And computing requirements can be huge. Tens or hundred of thousands cores for hours or days for the cutting edge highest fidelity simulations for answers that might be wrong. Computational and experimental aerodynamics still very much complement each other.
Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?
Yep, but 11! windtunnels for 23 mio.?
Getting the air to move is one thing.. Getting calibrated measurements out of the experiment is something else, and the Hardware required is EXPENSIVE!.
Also: seeing what we are talikng about NEW tunnels, these will have to enable research currently not possible with existing tunnels.
There are many low speed tunnels available.
The money is way of what is required for large scale trannsonic tunnels (when did you last see a 1:1 or 1:2 airliner in a tunnel?).
I would therefore guess at high supersonic and hypersonic tunnels. Again a field where 23 mio. will not last very long.
Is this seed money, marketing money, or is something going on which I can not account for?
Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?
>>or is something going on
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is linked to the UK's chumocracy.
Aside: How's that whole Teesside Freeport thing doing...?
Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?
10 years ago I used a large eddy simulation code to analyze a simple cylinder in a flow - basically a 3D version of a 2D problem. It took 4 days using 128 cores to run it.
Wind tunnels
"Massive tubes covered in channels for air to blow through" - not really sure what the 'covered in channels' is referring to - seems a bit misleading. Typically they are a tube, either open-ended or more commonly a closed-loop, with a fan inside blowing air through it. One area will be designated the working section or test section which is where the object being assessed will be placed. The scale can vary enormously, from a few square centimetres cross-section for some supersonic tunnels in education, to many metres for full-scale automotive testing.
Decent introductory info in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_tunnel
Puzzled me too
Shades of "a series of tubes".
Re: Wind tunnels
Be interesting to see what regime they are planning for the wind tunnel. Given that there is already a good capability in the UK for putting civil aircraft models into a representative airflow and various wind tunnels and blower tunnels* used by car designers and others, one wonders whether the money is going in to a hypersonics capability.
*blowers aren't closed loop. A closed loop can save energy, and some can be pressurised to make the airflow round a model match the airflow round a real aircraft a lot more accurately. (Reynold's number equivalence.)
The UK used to have a lot more large scale wind tunnels but they got shut down in the 80s/90s/00s. Bedford and Farnborough both had numerous wind tunnels operated by government research agencies, not to mention numerous industry ones dotted around. £72m would struggle to build one of these, so it's would seem to be regaining capability but on the smaller scale of university research tunnels.
The Bedford site is largely vacant. It had a fully working vertical wind tunnel and various buildings with horizontal wind tunnels. I’m sure this former RAE site could be cost effectively brought back into service.
Unfortunately, I suspect the Flowrider has been removed…
Wind tunnesl aside, what's going on with the picture that goes with this article?
Presumably, it's supposed to show two "scientists" working in a lab. A few observations:
- No lab I have ever seen has a wall high window like that
- Why aren't they wearing goggles?
- Do your lab coat up, it's there to protect you from spills, not as a fashion accessory
- Don't wave your arms around with unsecured beakers of "reagent" lying around like that
- Ever heard of a fume hood? Even if they're not using them right now, it's a pretty shit lab with no containment.
- So much blue liquid
- WTF is your laptop doing on the bench, it should be in the clean room?
I could go on, but I fear I may have overstated my point already...
Jeez
72 million?? Definitely will NOT ensure the UK is at the forefront of scientific discovery.
What are these people smoking??