Coupling CAD and CFD codes within a virtual integration platform

The Virtual Integration Platform (VIP) is an essential component of the VIRTUE project. It provides a system for combining disparate numerical analysis methods into a simulation environment. The platform allows for defining process chains, allocating of which tools to be used, and assigning users to perform the individual tasks. The platform also manages the data that are imported into or generated within a process, so that a version history of input and output can be evaluated. Within the VIP, a re-usable template for a given process chain can be created. A process chain is composed of one or more smaller tasks. For each of these tasks, a selection of available tools can be allocated. The advanced scripting methods in the VIP use wrappers for managing the individual tools. A wrapper allows communication between the platform and the tool, and passes input and output data as necessary, in most cases without modifying the tool in any way. In this way, third-party tools may also be used without the need for access to source code or special modifications. The included case study demonstrates several advantages of using the integration platform. A parametric propeller design process couples CAD and CFD codes to adapt the propeller to given operating constraints. The VIP template helped eliminate common user errors, and captured enough expert knowledge so that the casual user could perform the given tasks with minimal guidance. Areas of improvements to in-house codes and to the overall process were identified while using the integration platform. Additionally, the process chain was designed to facilitate formal optimisation methods

Aerated blast furnace slag filters for enhanced nitrogen and phosphorus removal from small wastewater treatment plants

Rock filters (RF) are a promising alternative technology for natural wastewater treatment for upgrading WSP effluent. However, the application of RF in the removal of eutrophic nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, is very limited. Accordingly, the overall objective of this study was to develop a lowcost RF system for the purpose of enhanced nutrient removal from WSP effluents, which would be able to produce effluents which comply with the requirements of the EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD) (911271lEEC) and suitable for small communities. Therefore, a combination system comprising a primary facultative pond and an aerated rock filter (ARF) system-either vertically or horizontally loaded-was investigated at the University of Leeds' experimental station at Esholt Wastewater Treatment Works, Bradford, UK. Blast furnace slag (BFS) and limestone were selected for use in the ARF system owing to their high potential for P removal and their low cost. This study involved three major qperiments: (1) a comparison of aerated vertical-flow and horizontal-flow limestone filters for nitrogen removal; (2) a comparison of aerated limestone + blast furnace slag (BFS) filter and aerated BFS filters for nitrogen and phosphorus removal; and (3) a comparison of vertical-flow and horizontal-flow BFS filters for nitrogen and phosphorus removal. The vertical upward-flow ARF system was found to be superior to the horizontal-flow ARF system in terms of nitrogen removal, mostly thiough bacterial nitrification processes in both the aerated limestone and BFS filter studies. The BFS filter medium (whieh is low-cost) showed a much higher potential in removing phosphortls from pond effluent than the limestone medium. As a result, the combination of a vertical upward-flow ARF system and an economical and effective P-removal filter medium, such as BFS, was found to be an ideal optionfor the total nutrient removal of both nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater. In parallel with these experiments, studies on the aerated BFS filter effective life and major in-filter phosphorus removal pathways were carried out. From the standard batch experiments of Pmax adsorption capacity of BFS, as well as six-month data collection of daily average P-removal, it was found that the effective life of the aerated BFS filter was 6.5 years. Scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction spectrometric analyses on the surface of BFS, particulates and sediment samples revealed that the apparent mechanisms of P-removal in the filter are adsorption on the amorphous oxide phase of the BFS surface and precipitation within the filter

A collaborative platform for integrating and optimising Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis requests

A Virtual Integration Platform (VIP) is described which provides support for the integration of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis tools into an environment that supports the use of these tools in a distributed collaborative manner. The VIP has evolved through previous EU research conducted within the VRShips-ROPAX 2000 (VRShips) project and the current version discussed here was developed predominantly within the VIRTUE project but also within the SAFEDOR project. The VIP is described with respect to the support it provides to designers and analysts in coordinating and optimising CFD analysis requests. Two case studies are provided that illustrate the application of the VIP within HSVA: the use of a panel code for the evaluation of geometry variations in order to improve propeller efficiency; and, the use of a dedicated maritime RANS code (FreSCo) to improve the wake distribution for the VIRTUE tanker. A discussion is included detailing the background, application and results from the use of the VIP within these two case studies as well as how the platform was of benefit during the development and a consideration of how it can benefit HSVA in the future

A Pure Java Parallel Flow Solver

In this paper an overview is given on the "Have Java" project to attain a pure Java parallel Navier-Stokes flow solver (JParNSS) based on the thread concept and remote method invocation (RMI). The goal of this project is to produce an industrial flow solver running on an arbitrary sequential or parallel architecture, utilizing the Internet, capable of handling the most complex 3D geometries as well as flow physics, and also linking to codes in other areas such as aeroelasticity etc. Since Java is completely object-oriented the code has been written in an object-oriented programming (OOP) style. The code also includes a graphics user interface (GUI) as well as an interactive steering package for the parallel architecture. The Java OOP approach provides profoundly improved software productivity, robustness, and security as well as reusability and maintainability. OOP allows code construction similar to the aerodynamic design process because objects can be software coded and integrated, reflecting actual design procedures. In addition, Java is the programming language of the Internet and thus Java is the programming language of the Internet and thus Java objects on disparate machines or even separate networks can be connected. We explain the motivation for the design of JParNSS along with its capabilities that set it apart from other solvers. In the first two sections we present a discussion of the Java language as the programming tool for aerospace applications. In section three the objectives of the Have Java project are presented. In the next section the layer structures of JParNSS are discussed with emphasis on the parallelization and client-server (RMI) layers. JParNSS, like its predecessor ParNSS (ANSI-C), is based on the multiblock idea, and allows for arbitrarily complex topologies. Grids are accepted in GridPro property settings, grids of any size or block number can be directly read by JParNSS without any further modifications, requiring no additional preparation time for the solver input. In the last section, computational results are presented, with emphasis on multiprocessor Pentium and Sun parallel systems run by the Solaris operating system (OS)

Virtual design for the interactive placement of baffles in air flow

This thesis develops an interactive engineering design tool for the placement of baffles in air systems. This design tool integrates together the needed design analysis tools into a single interactive environment. This design tool has three primary components: (1) a CFD model of air flow through the system, (2) a virtual environment, and (3) a baffle placement and remeshing scheme. The CFD model used in conjunction with the design tool should be fast, accurate, and answer the current questions associated with the air system. The virtual environment includes an intuitive user interface and a graphical representation of the model. The design tool should also incorporate an easy baffle placement and remeshing scheme to easily allow the creation new CFD models for analysis. This allows users to design baffle configurations in a virtual environment and complete analysis through the integration of analysis tools through this single design tool. In the work presented in this thesis the design tool is demonstrated on two examples: an engine platform and a cleaning shoe in a combine. Current methods for design and decision-making processes for baffle placement within these types of air systems are inefficient and time consuming. Often CFD models of air systems are large and complex and require several days to complete an analysis. Under the current process, analysts are required to create new full-scale CFD models for each design iteration. Designers then have to wait for the results to come back before determining if another modification to the air system design is necessary. This can be extremely time consuming if a suitable solution is not immediately found. Introduction of the design tool developed in this thesis into the design and decision-making process simplifies and improves the overall process and the roles of those involved

Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Indoor Environmental Performance Analysis

The report is a part of a research assignment carried out by students in the 5ETCS course “Project Byggeri – [entitled as: Building Information Modeling (BIM) – Modeling & Analysis]”, during the 3rd semester of master degree in Civil and Architectural Engineering, Department of Engineering, Aarhus University. This includes seven papers describing  BIM for Sustainability, concentrating specifically on individual topics regarding to Indoor Environment Performance Analysis

Teamwork collaboration around simulation data in an industrial context

2013 - 2014Nowadays even more small, medium and large enterprises are world-wide and com- pete on a global market. In order to face the new challenges, industries have multiple co-located and geographically dispersed teams that work across time, space, and organ- isational boundaries. A virtual team or a dispersed team is a group of geographically, organisationally and/or time dispersed knowledge workers who coordinate their work using electronic technologies to accomplish a common goal. The advent of Internet and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) technologies can reduce the distances between these teams and are used to support the collaboration among them. The topic of this thesis concerns the engineering dispersed teams and their collaboration within enterprises. In this context, the contributions of this thesis are the following: I was able to (1) identify the key collaborative requirements analysing a real use case of two engineering dispersed teams within Fiat Chrysler Automobiles; (2) address each of them with an integrated, extensible and modular architecture; (3) implement a working in- dustrial prototype called Floasys to collect, centralise, search, and share simulations as well as automate repetitive, error-prone and time-consuming tasks like the document generation; (4) design a tool called ExploraTool to visually explore a repository of sim- ulations provided by Floasys, and (5) identify the possible extensions of this work to other contexts (like aeronautic, rail and naval sectors). The rst research aim of this work is the analysis of the key collaborative require- ments within a real industrial use case of geographically dispersed teams. In order to gather these requirements, I worked closely with two geographically separated en- gineering teams in Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA): one team located in Pomigliano D'Arco (Italy) and the other one in Torino (Italy). Both teams use computer numerical Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations to design vehicle products simulating physical phenomenons, such as vehicle aerodynamic and its drag coefficient, or the in- ternal ow for the passengers thermal comfort. The applied methodology to collect the collaborative and engineering requirements is based on an extensive literature review, on site directly observations, stakeholders' interviews and an user survey. The identi ed key collaborative requirements as actions to perform to improve the collaboration among dispersed teams are: centralise simulation data, provide metadata over simulation data, provide search facility, simulation data versioning, and data sharing... [edited by Author]XIII n.s

Teamwork collaboration around CAE models in an industrial context

2015 - 2016Medium and Large Companies must compete every day in a global context. To achieve greater efficiency in their products/processes they are forced to globalize by opening multiple locations in geographically distant places. In this context, people from the same team or different teams must work together regardless of the time zone and where they are located. Therefore, a "virtual" team consists of groups of geographically distant people who can coordinate with the help of new technologies. The tools and methodologies supporting "Computer Supported Cooperative Work" (CSCW) can facilitate collaboration by reducing distance and time related issues. The main goals CSCW aims to achieve within a complex organization are listed below: • Schedule, track, and chart the steps in a project as it is being completed (Project Management) • Share, review, approve or reject project proposals from other workgroup members (Authoring Systems) • Collaborative management of tasks and documents within a knowledge-based business process (Workflow Management) • Collect, organize, manage, and share various forms of information (Knowledge Management) • Collaborative bookmarking engine to tag, organize, share, and search enterprise data (Enterprise Bookmarking) • Collect, organize, manage and share information associated with the delivery of a project (Extranet Systems) • Quickly share company information to members within a company via Internet (Intranet Systems) • Organize social relations of groups (Social Network) • Collaborate and share structured data and information (Online SpreadSheet) This work is based on the main objectives outlined through a specific research experience that verifies compliance and ensures its applicability. The real context consists of virtual team of engineers and the way they cooperate within the automotive industry. The research “iter” can be summarized as follows: (1) the main collaborative and engineering requirements have been identified by referring to a real use case within Fiat Chrysler Automobiles; (2) each requirement has been met by implementing an integrated, modular and extensible architecture; (3) Floasys platform for collecting, centralizing and sharing simulations has been designed, implemented and tested; (4) a tool called ExploraTool has been designed to visually explore a simulation repository within Floasys; (5) the possible extension of the platform has been identified in terms of multidisciplinarity and multisectorality; (6) downstream of the whole process, all the requirements a CSCW intended to meet were verified. The initial phase of the work has focused on collecting collaborative requirements and related needs that emerge when different virtual teams find themselves collaborating to pursue a common result. The collaborative requirements identified to support collaboration between geographically remote teams are: centralizing simulation data, providing annotation and adding metadata to files, providing a search engine for simulations completed by other analysts, providing data versioning and support their sharing. In line with the requirements identified, a collaborative platform prototype (CSCW) called Floasys was developed. Floasys customers are all industries using CAE simulations to design their products, so the automotive, aeronautical and naval industries, etc. Floasys collects simulation data, stores them in open XML format and centralizes them into a shared repository; It also provides additional services on collected data stored in open format, such as the ability to annotate files or search within the repository regardless of the simulator with which they were generated. It is extremely useful to be able to retrieve simulations from other members of the same team or different teams in order to compare the performance of a current project. In order to provide these services, various aspects must be considered: surely the services listed above must be immersed in an existing business environment with existing practices, workflows and software systems. To bring a concrete example, the only centralization of simulation data involves communication with existing simulation software by mitigating the problem of Vendor Lock-In, which is the strong dependence on the simulators themselves. From an architectural point of view, Floasys meets the non-functional extensibility and modularity requirements. This way the system can be tailored to the needs of customers, open to meet future needs and be used in other departments. The modular and extensible Floasys architecture was obtained based on the concept of plug-in. Although the research activity directly concerns the automotive industry, the requirements and the difficulties described are common to other sectors as described in the literature. So many of the considerations made in this work and the solutions adopted can be reused for other types of simulation as well as for data obtained from experiments. Finally, within Floasys, an interactive tool called "ExploraTool" was integrated for viewing, exploring, and querying simulation repositories. Although the idea of this tool was born in the context of simulation repository navigation, it is generic and can be used with any dataset. The tool is based on Eulero-Venn diagrams. The universe is the set of all simulations stored in one or more repositories. Simulation groups are represented by grafted ellipses. Using this tool, analysts can explore the repository through drill-down and roll-up operations to get more or less detail. Going down in the hierarchy, the user filters the items within the dataset and performs a graphical query. In this way, the user explores the repository by finally obtaining two or more simulations to be compared. After the design, implementation and implementation phase, the tool was tested with real users to gain data on its usability. [edited by author]XV n.s

Confidence, Collaboration, Trust: Developing An Interprofessional EMS Obstetric Skills Training Program

Obstetric emergency calls (OB) in the City of Charlottesville are infrequent among Emergency Medical Services’ (EMS) dispatch, giving EMS providers little exposure to out-of-hospital birth and few opportunities to improve their OB field skills. In contrast, midwives have regular exposure to home birth. The purpose of this participatory research paper is to examine trends in interprofessional training with simulation as a strategy for improving critical competencies; test the effects of a midwife-led, interprofessional training curriculum on EMS workers’ self-efficacy; and foster partnerships to execute and scale the training. Literature on interprofessional training with simulation was analyzed. Interviews, meetings, training manuals, and organization-wide surveys were assessed to measure EMS needs and certification standards. Follow-up surveys and interviews were evaluated after the training to measure outcomes. The literature revealed evidence that interprofessional training improves participants’ confidence and skills. Initial interviews and meetings with EMS employees found low-confidence in the effectiveness of current trainings and a desire for simulations. Self-assessment surveys (n=66) showed 83.4% (n=49) of respondents lacked confidence in their OB skills. A follow-up survey was completed by 28 participants with responses matched to their pre-survey results. 50% (n=14) had at least one level of improvement in confidence. Interprofessional training with simulation helps improve EMS crews’ OB skills, capacity to collaborate with midwives in the field, and confidence levels. More research is needed, but initial results are promising for scaling interprofessional training to further municipalities and supporting partnerships between EMS and home birth midwives.Master of Public Healt

FluidDyn: a Python open-source framework for research and teaching in fluid dynamics

FluidDyn is a project to foster open-science and open-source in the fluid dynamics community. It is thought of as a research project to channel open-source dynamics, methods and tools to do science. We propose a set of Python packages forming a framework to study fluid dynamics with different methods, in particular laboratory experiments (package fluidlab), simulations (packages fluidfft, fluidsim and fluidfoam) and data processing (package fluidimage). In the present article, we give an overview of the specialized packages of the project and then focus on the base package called fluiddyn, which contains common code used in the specialized packages. Packages fluidfft and fluidsim are described with greater detail in two companion papers, Mohanan et al. (2018a,b). With the project FluidDyn, we demonstrate that specialized scientific code can be written with methods and good practices of the open-source community. The Mercurial repositories are available in Bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org/fluiddyn/). All codes are documented using Sphinx and Read the Docs, and tested with continuous integration run on Bitbucket, Pipelines and Travis. To improve the reuse potential, the codes are as modular as possible, leveraging the simple object-oriented programming model of Python. All codes are also written to be highly efficient, using C++, Cython and Pythran to speedup the performance of critical functions