This award facilitates scientific research using the large new computational resource named Blue Waters being developed by IBM and scheduled to be deployed at the University of Illinois. It provides travel funds to support technical coordination between the principal investigators at Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Washington, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of Texas at Austin, the Blue Waters project team and vendor technical team.
The proposed research employs direct numerical simulations (DNS) to address research questions associated with three high Reynolds number turbulent flows: a turbulent non-premixed methane flame; scalar mixing and particle dispersion in isotropic turbulence; and turbulent wall-bounded flow in a channel. In each case, the central emphasis is on reaching sufficiently high Reynolds number to explore the resulting complex physics. Due to the compute time requirements, these simulations, which are on grids up to 8192-cubed resolution or equivalent, are not feasible on existing facilities and exceed what is experimentally possible. The advanced algorithms developed by the researchers will allow the simulations to address fundamental research issues at the heart of energy production (turbulent combustion) and consumption (transportation) technologies.
Turbulent combustion is at the center of a large fraction of US energy production, and wall-bounded turbulence is central to the energy losses inherent in transportation. An understanding of the detailed dynamics of the turbulence in these applications will likely increase predictive capabilities of the effects of turbulence leading to enhanced performance through improved design. Thus, the primary impact of the proposed DNS and the subsequent research that it will enable will be on the engineering of combustion and transportation systems. This in turn affects energy consumption and pollution.
