MEng Civil Engineering with Industrial Experience / Course details

Part 1: The Finite-Volume Method - the dominant approach to fluid-flow simulation in general-purpose CFD codes. This section includes practical civil-engineering-type exercises with the major commercial code StarCCM+.

Part 2: Shallow-Water Flows - specialist CFD for civil engineering. Widely used in predicting river, estuarine and coastal flows.

• To introduce students to the numerical simulation of incompressible fluid flow.
• For students to understand and be able to choose and apply appropriate discretisation techniques for partial differential equations, particularly those describing fluid flow.
• To acquaint students with major in-house and commercial CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software and how to apply such software to typical civil-engineering problems, such as wind-loading, ventilation, pollution dispersion, coastal and estuarine flows.

Part 1: The Finite-Volume Method (Dr Apsley)
(1) Governing equations: conservative and non-conservative forms; some exact solutions; common approximations.
(2) Finite-volume techniques: discretisation of standard advection-diffusion problem; time-marching; pressure-correction methods; computer methods for solving matrix equations.
(3) Turbulence and its modelling: Reynolds averaging and Reynolds stresses; basic theory and log law; “industry-type” turbulence models.
(4) 3D geometric techniques (areas, volumes, averages) and presentation of 3D data.
(5) Use of in-house research code STREAM (1 exercise) and commercial code StarCCM+ (2 exercises) for industry-type problems (e.g. wind loading).

Part 2: Shallow-Water Flows (Dr Rogers)
(6) Shallow-water (depth-averaged) approximation and equations; specialist solution techniques.
(7) In-house software example (1 exercise).

Individual feedback will be posted online after marking, with common problems summarised in class.

Exam - class summary in Blackboard