UKTC 2018-2026
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The UK Turbulence Consortium


Understanding, predicting and controlling turbulent flows is of central importance and a limiting factor to a vast range of industries: naval, aeronautical, automotive, power generation, process, pharmaceutical, meteorological and environmental. For example, energy-efficient fluid mixing is a major limiting factor in the chemical industry which is the second largest industrial consumer of energy worldwide, but also in the pharmaceutical and process industries. How can one mix best with as little power loss as possible? The cost of pumping oil and gas through pipelines is directly proportional to the frictional losses due to turbulence. Polymer additives can modify the turbulence in these pipelines to reduce frictional losses and speed up the flow by one or two orders of magnitude with the same power input. How can one maximise this effect which remains poorly understood? Moving vehicles often generate noise, and in the case of airplanes, it can have a severe detrimental impact close to airports. What kind of airbrake could generate enough drag with as little aeroacoustic losses as possible? Worldwide ocean shipping consumes about 2.1 billion barrels of oil per year while the airline industry uses 1.5 billion barrels per year. How can turbulent boundary layers be controlled to significantly reduce friction drag which will simultaneously reduce costs and emissions? Simulating and understanding turbulent flows to answer the previous questions is one of the most challenging problems in science. Many of the environmental and energy-related issues we face today cannot possibly be tackled without a better understanding of turbulence. The overarching objective of the UK Turbulence Consortium (UKTC) is to facilitate world-class turbulence research using national High-End Computing (HEC) resources. This involves performing numerical experiments with turbulence-resolving computational approaches. Such simulations are ab initio calculations based on first principles and produce data to answer basic questions regarding the physics and modelling of turbulent flows found across a range of engineering, physiological and geophysical applications. The consortium serves as a forum to communicate research and HEC expertise within the UK turbulence community, and to help UK science remain internationally leading in this aspect of HEC-based research.

Firstly funded in 1995, the UKTC has been through five highly successful iterations, with significant growth, from 5 original members to nearly 70 members over nearly 25 UK institutions for the present bid (36 members in the previous bid). In the last 22 years, the UKTC has (i) demonstrated its ability to convert access to national High-End Computing (HEC) resources into internationally leading research, (ii) established its international competitiveness, (iii) helped its members to leverage and secure multi-million £ grants from governmental funding bodies and industries, (iv) allowed the discovery of new fluid flow phenomena which have led to new ways of improving beneficial effects and reducing negative effects of turbulent flows and (v) facilitated the design of more sophisticated turbulence models redefining industry standards.

Please contact Sylvain Laizet (s.laizet @ imperial.ac.uk) if you are interested in joining the consortium.
Current list of members:

University of Birmingham:
Chandan Bose, Bruno Fraga, Zhong Nan Wang

University of Bristol:
Nick Zang, Yufen Yao, Mohammad Jadidi

Brunel University London:
James Tyacke, ​Jun Xia

University of Cambridge:
Andy Wheeler

University of Cardiff:
Elisabetta De Angelis, Zhihua Xie

City St George's University:
​Mohammad Omidyeganeh, Juan Guzmán-Iñigo, Alfredo Pinelli

University College London:
Kai Luo, Tom Smith

University of Cranfield:
Tamás István Józsa, Martin Stoke, Takis Tsoutsanis

Daresbury Lab:
Dave Emerson, Stefano Rolfo, Charles Moulinec

University of Durham:
Laura Curie

University of Edinburgh:
Alexander Morozov, ​Antonio Attili, Moritz Linkmann, Steve Tobias, Paul Bartholomew

University of Exeter:
Xu Chu, Beth Wingate, Joanne Mason

Heriot-Watt University:
Qingping Zou

University of Hertfordshire:
​Hongwei Wu

​Imperial College London:
​Maarten van Reeuwijk, George Papadakis, Sina Stapelfeldt, George Rigas, Spencer Sherwin, Peter Vincent, Pavlos Aleiferis, Yongyun Hwang, Luca Magri, Sylvain Laizet, Bil Jones, Chris Cantwell, Aimee Morgans, Anh Khoa​ Doan

King's College London:
David Moxey, Richard Jefferson-Loveday, Yabin Liu

University of Leicester:
Ali Haghiri

University of Liverpool:
Mehdi Seddighi

Liverpool John Moores University:

Sean Malkeson

Loughborough University:
Jialin Su, Gary Page, Hao Xia, Lu Tian

University of Manchester:
Alistair Revell, Pablo Ouro, Alex Skillen, Jack King, Miguel Beneitez, Imran Afgan

University of Newcastle:
Nilanjan Chakraborty, Umair Ahmed, Mohsen Lahooti, Francesco Zonta

University of Nottingham:
Christopher Ellis

Nottingham Trent University:
Amirreza Rouhi

University of Oxford:
Wouter Mostert

Queen Mary London:
Xi Jiang, Eldad Avital, Nikos Bempedelis

Queen's University Belfast:
Ben Thornber

University of Salford:
Cung Ngyuen, Marta Camps Santasmasas

University of Sheffield:
Elena Marensi, Shuisheng He, Pierre Ricco

Sheffield Hallam University:
Adriano Cerminara​, Harish Viswanathan

University of Southampton:
Zhengtong Xie, Neil Sandham, Zhiwei Hu, Ralf Deiterding, Jae-Wook Kim, Temistocle Grenga

University of Surrey:
Olaf Marxen

University of Swansea:
Zhaoxin Ren, Alper Celik

University of Warwick:
Gihan Mudalige, Yongmann Chung
​
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The main objectives of the consortium are:
(1) Facilitate world-class turbulence research using national High-End Computing (HEC) resources. This involves performing numerical experiments with turbulence-resolving computational approaches. Such simulations are ab-initio calculations based on first principles and produce data to answer basic questions regarding the physics and modelling of turbulent flows found across a range of engineering, physiological and geophysical applications.
(2) Provide the central core of a needed critical mass activity considering the big challenges posed by turbulence.
(3) Serve as a forum to communicate research and HEC expertise within the UK turbulence community, and to help UK science remain internationally leading in this aspect of HEC-based research.
(4) Offer to our members networking, mentoring and jobs opportunities, travel grants for code development and engagement with industries, support towards Tier 0 applications, access and core support to a suite of complementary flow solvers.
(5) Develop software that will enable new research areas to be tackled with HEC and will help production codes used in the UK to capitalize on future HEC architectures, giving UK researchers the opportunity to be the first to explore new physics.

​​The consortium is split into seven carefully designed Work Packages (WPs): four core work packages, WP1 (Boundary Layers, Pipes and Channels), WP2 (Jets, Wakes and Shear Layers), WP3 (Heat Transfer and Mixing) and WP4 (Aeroacoustics and High-Speed Flows) and 3 transverse work packages, WPA (world-class and world-leading Grand Challenges), WPB (Multicore/Manycore Algorithms) and WPC (Towards Industrial Cases).
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  • Home
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  • AI HUB
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  • CCP Turbulence
  • Sustainable HPC
    • Workshop 2026
  • Videos
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