Visit the Puppy in Spain!
Any feedback about the course may be given by
email,
and is much appreciated.
| Nothing much to do today. See the hardware and software and be impressed. Please fill out your account application forms and apply for laboratory sessions. |
| In this Laboratory you will start working your way through the STRAND6 Tutorial Book. Copies of the relevant parts of the tutorial book are in the HPC Lab. (Do not remove!) To get maximum benefit from this Laboratory you should also look at the STRAND6 Reference Manual and User Guide. There are 4 copies of this (and its Addendum) available for reference in the HPC Lab as well. Could you please return these to the "library table" when you have finished with them. |
| In this Laboratory we will learn more about the abilities of STRAND6 to model structures made up of beams and plates. This type of structure is common to both the PUPPY sculpture and to the guitar with bracing. Part of the laboratory is based on Example 2 of the Strand Examples book. |
| This laboratory introduces the Natural Frequency and the Nonlinear Static solvers. Part 1 deals with the modes of vibration of a square wooden plate. Part 2 revisits the 2D welded frame model of Lab 1 and looks at its nonlinear stability. |
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Make sure that you all come to the lecture on Wednesday 1 April
as this will introduce the two Strand projects that you will be
able to work on over the next four weeks. You will have
a choice of analysing the famous Puppy sculpture or of experimenting
with the use of Strand to design a guitar. Divide yourselves into
small groups for these projects (1-3 with possibly 4 for the guitar
as explained on Wednesday). I can help you organise these during your
lab sessions this week, but will not be free on Thursday and Friday
morning. There is also scope for you to define your own project
if you wish.
Project reports will be due in at my office at 5pm on Friday May 1. Technical tips for doing these projects. Group meetings with a friendly lecturer?... If you wish to contact me to schedule a group meeting please do so. Probably a good idea....Henry
Wednesday April 8th: (week 6)Come along during the lecture time slot today to get back your Lab3 reports and to finalise the groups for your Puppy/guitar projects. I will run labs on Wednesday and Thursday this week to get you started. If anyone from the Friday groups wants to join in please do so. I can also set up labs at a special time if you want me to.
Wednesday April 29th: (week 7)There will be a very interesting lecture on a computational project in petroleum engineering on this day.
Proposed changes to assessment weighting for Strand6 projectsAs discussed in the lecture on Wednesday May 13, there is a proposal to change the weighting of the Strand assignments from 20% to 40% at the expense of the 40% weighting on the exam. Because this is a dramatic change, Henry would like to hear from people who strongly disagree with it. There are ramifications about the way in which the exam will be set and views on this are also sought. A decision needs to be made soon.
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Over the next five weeks we will introduce some of the basic
concepts of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This area is of huge
importance, being relevant not only to engineering but also to
physics, chemistry, biological science, environmental science, climate
modeling etc. As a consequence of its widespread use CFD
is a major consumer of high performance computing resources, and is
in itself a driving force for the development of even faster
supercomputers. Like STRAND and other structural analysis codes CFD codes can require supercomputing resources, but equally like STRAND it is possible to perform a great deal of useful work using a relatively cheap workstation. The "art" of all computational science is to identify your problem, start with a simple model, then progressively make it more complex (closer to reality) while monitoring what effect this has on your results. As and when the need arises you move to more powerful computers. For our work we will be using the FLUENT CFD package. This package is extremely widely used, being one of the top CFD packages worldwide. At its core FLUENT numerically solves a system of partial differential equations using the finite difference approach. Before actually using Fluent it is helpful to explore briefly the underlying numerical methods used in Fluent. The aim of this lab will be to give you a better understanding of issues like, numerical grids, relaxation factors, time independent and time dependent methods etc.
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This week we will look at using Fluent and specifically how to:
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Turbulence, Grids and SymmetryThis week we will begin the main CFD assignment. The aim is to look at modeling a flame. The following figures show the temperature distribution calculated for methane burning in air. The simulation has been carried out using the symmetrical non-uniform grid shown.
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Species and Enthalpy ConservationOver the next two weeks you will be working on the combustion modeling assignment. In lab 9 we set up a non uniform grid and looked at mixing of air in a combustor. We now introduce methane, ignite it and study consider various properties of the system. The assignment and lecture will introduce you to how CFD calculations handle species and enthalpy conservation.
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Nothing new today. Just some comments on what I expect in the assignment!
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