MSc (Eng) Research in Thermofluids - Heat and Fluid Flow Optimisation

University of Leeds

To complete a postgraduate research programme, you’ll need to be dedicated and passionate about your area of study. But it’ll be well worth it. Being a doctoral student is challenging, yet incredibly rewarding. You are expected to carry out a programme of research in a particular area under the supervision of a primary supervisor and one or more co-supervisors.Management of heat and associated fluid flows is an important consideration in many industrial applications, ranging from large-scale industrial ovens, huge datacentres and air-conditioning/ventilation systems to precise thermal cycling control for polymerase chain reactions. We use various Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques, combined with experimental validation, to understand and improve such systems. However, CFD techniques are generally computationally expensive, so a particular focus is on combining CFD analysis with metamodel-based optimisation techniques to enable efficient optimisation of heat and fluid flow. Our research has produced performance and energy improvements in fuel filtration systems, emergency response vehicles, twist drills and mixing equipment. Current interests lie in circulation-based control for torque augmentation in wind turbines, automotive thermal management, polymer drag reduction in pipelines, and electronics cooling.