Facilities and resources

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Fluids Lab

The Sheffield Unsteady Flow Facility (SUFF) has been developed for fundamental studies of turbulence, especially for unsteady flows over smooth and rough surfaces. The rig is equipped with LDA, PIV and hot-films for turbulence measurement.

HeFT fluids lab

Main references:

  • Gorji, S. A study of turbulence in transient channel flows. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sheffield (2015).
  • Mathur, A. Study of accelerating and decelerating turbulent flows in a channel. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sheffield (2016).

High Performance Computing (HPC)

The group has several dedicated clusters.

  • Stokes I & II
  • Boltzmann (Aberdeen)
  • Stokes III (nodes attached to iceberg)
High Performance Computing clusters

CFD Packages

  • TranPipe (RANS)

The code has been developed for solving axially fully developed unsteady flow in a pipe. It is equipped with various turbulence models and numerical schemes. The code has been used to study accelerating, decelerating and pulsating flows in a pipe.

  • SWIRL (RANS)

The code has been developed for solving flow and energy equations in 2D Cartesian or axi-symmetrical coordinates. It is equipped with a number of turbulence models and various numerical methods. The code has been used by a number of research groups around the world for a wide range of problems, including, for example, mixed convection in a pipe/annulus, impinging jet and heat transfer to fluids at supercritical pressure.

  • CHAPSim (DNS)

The code is mostly for a channel/pipe flow with various wall conditions (smooth, rough, isothermal and thermal). It adopts a second order central finite difference method for spatial discretisation on a staggered mesh. For time advancement, a low storage third-order Runge-Kutta scheme is used for the non-linear terms and a second order Crank-Nicholson scheme is used for the viscous terms, which are combined with a fractional-step method. The Poisson equation for the pressure is solved by an efficient 2-D FFT. The immersed boundary method (IBM) has been implemented for the treatment of rough surfaces. The code is parallelized using the Message-Passing Interface (MPI).

  • LBMCODE (LBM)

The code has been developed for solving two-phase flows in complex geometries. A number of two-phase flow models have been implemented, including free energy model [Swift et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 830, (1995)], kinetic-based LBM [He et al., J. Comput. Phys. 152, 642 (1999)] & LBM for binary fluid systems [Zheng et al., J. Comput. Phys. 218, 353 (2006)], etc. The code has also included novel two-phase flow models recently developed in the group which have a number of advantages over other models.

  • The group also uses the commercial CFD package ANSYS FLUENT and an open source CFD package Code_Saturne developed at EDF.

A global reputation

Sheffield is a world top-100 research university with a global reputation for excellence. We're a member of the Russell Group: one of the 24 leading UK universities for research and teaching.

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