A student at the University of Manchester has used computer gaming technology to develop software capable of generating large-scale engineering simulations.
These simulations could help the world meet its growing need for renewable energy.
“The original motivations for this project come from the fact that with the renewable energy demands over recent years, a proportion of that will be met with offshore energy,” said Alex Chow, a doctoral student from Manchester’s School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering.
“So there is a requirement for engineers to design structures (wind turbines, wave energy converters, vessels/ships to transport these etc.) which will gather this energy in the offshore environments,” he continued.
“These environments can be very violent and unpredictable. So to save money, time, and manpower in testing these massive structures on site or in a facility, scientific computer simulations are employed.”
Chow used graphic processing units (GPUs), technology traditionally used to create realistic visuals in video games, to create large-scale simulations of “violent fluid flows.” This includes simulations of strong waves crashing on offshore wind turbines to predict the potential damage to the turbines.
GPU has recently emerged as a great tool to speed up scientific simulations. It can run some applications more than 100 times faster than conventional computers.
Complex, accurate computer simulations are traditionally done on a “supercomputer.”
Instead of having a single computing unit, like a standard computer, a GPU has thousands of them. This is necessary because large simulations, like this one, have billions of calculations and millions of data points.
While supercomputers have been proven effective, they are extremely expensive, use a lot of energy, and are only available to select scientists and researchers.
GPUs are much cheaper, energy-efficient and smaller than the traditional supercomputers needed to do these complex computer simulations. Supercomputers can require an entire room or facility to fit them in, but GPUs are sometimes small enough to fit inside of a laptop.
“Using this kind of technology reduces the costs of complex scientific simulations from hundreds of thousands of pounds to just a couple of thousand,” Chow said in a statement.
“An advantage is that most researchers and small engineering companies are able to afford a relatively powerful laptop or computer with a quality GPU so it makes this kind of simulation and research even more accessible.”
To simulate complex, violent fluid flows, Chow developed a computer software for the scientific simulation method “Incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics” (ISPH).
Traditional simulation methods within the realm of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) all use a mesh/grid to represent the in simulation area.
“These are typically very good for a wide range of applications,” said Chow.
“But when it comes to violent free-surface fluid flows, where the water exhibits large deformations and can become fragmented, these traditional CFD mesh-based methods cannot deal with these too well.”
ISPH “does not use a mesh and is more suitable for simulating the characteristics of violent fluid flows,” Chow explained.
The new code Chow developed can compute millions of data points on one single device for 3D engineering applications.
Chow’s method will serve as a great tool, as the need for renewable energy increases.
“The amount of energy produced from offshore environments is increasing as the world tries to meet the world’s energy targets, but the ocean environment can be very violent and harsh, so efficiently designing structures for these environments is a difficult task,” Chow said in a statement.
“Using physical experiments can be extremely impractical and not representative of the problem. These simulations allow engineers and researchers to make important decisions about the design of a structure without having to invest in site visits and costly experiments.”
