Facilities and resources

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Fluids Lab

The 91Ö±²¥ 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 91Ö±²¥ (2015).
  • Mathur, A. Study of accelerating and decelerating turbulent flows in a channel. Ph.D. Thesis, University of 91Ö±²¥ (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

91Ö±²¥ 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.