On 23 July, Prof. David R. Emerson and Dr. Jianping Meng from STFC Daresbury Laboratory UK visited our institute. Prof. Emerson leads the Computational Engineering group at the Daresbury Laboratory. He has been instrumental in developing the role of high performance computing for engineering. His expertise lies in numerical algorithms, parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), non-equilibrium flows and microfluidics.

Prof. Emerson gave a scholar lecture titled “Energy and Environmental Engineering Using Open-Source Software and HPC”. He started with a brief introduction on the research at the Daresbury Laboratory and his group. Then he demonstrated the application of CFD by using a few specific cases including wind turbine, nuclear reactor, blood pump, dam breaking and flood. These cases show that CFD plays an important role in energy and environmental engineering. Moreover, Prof. Emersonintroduced the usage and capability of several broadly used open-source codes. He also summarized the development of high performance computing in the past, and predicted the possible achievement in the future. After the lecture, the researchers from IET actively discussed with Prof. Emerson onproblems encountered in their work, and Prof. Emerson responded patiently.

Nowadays, CFD is widely used in industry, and is becoming more and more popular. By using an open-source code, the relevant cost can be reduced greatly. More importantly, the code can be modified and extended freely to meet the specific requirements of users. Therefore, open-source codes can provide an attractive alternative to commercial CFD applications in industry. The academic event enhanced the understanding of young researchers in IET on the trend, frontiers, and key problems of CFD and open-source software.