Our next researcher in the #BearonTour series is Kit Windows-Yule, Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering, a Turing Fellow and two-time Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Fellow. Kit works jointly with the School of Physics and Astronomy’s Positron Imaging Centre.
with student Dominik Werner
Q1 – Tell me about your research
My research is highly diverse, but can be broadly described as the experimental imaging and numerical simulation of particulate, fluid, and multiphase media. I focus in particular on industrial applications, working with industry partners in diverse areas including the aerospace, agriculture, chemical, food, defence, green energy and pharmaceutical sectors.
Q2 – How do you use BEAR services?
My group are very heavy users of the BlueBEAR HPC (High Performance Computing) services. This can be for the processing of very large experimental data sets, but in particular for running simulations of industrial scale systems (inherently very computationally expensive!) and for running large numbers of parallel CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and DEM (Discrete Element Method) simulations, allowing for a “big data”-type approach. A lot of our work also involves AI, including evolutionary optimisation software which autonomously launches and analyses multiple “generations” of simulations.
Q3 – What is the best thing about BEAR (apart from me)
The ability to execute large-scale simulation campaigns on a scale I would have thought impossible 5 years ago!
Thanks to Kit and his group (especially Dominik Werner and Jack Sykes for being in the photos!) for a really interesting tour of their facilities.
Look out for our next researcher soon!