Experts from around the world will discuss the use and application of the computational fluid dynamics programs PHOENICS and FLAIR, with presentations covering car park ventilation systems, fire and smoke modelling, pollution in and around buildings, building services air flow and heat transmission problems, combustion, safety analyses of offshore and underground constructions and other relevant applications.

Conference spokesman Murray Mason says that computational fluid dynamics has an enormous diversity of applications in building, construction, engineering and environmental projects. “CFD is typically used for internal flows in modelling air conditioning and ventilation systems, cool and cold rooms,” he says. “It is also used for fire engineering to model fires in buildings, smoke spread and ventilation, as well as external flows in modelling including the flow of wind around a building, urban and industrial pollution studies, contaminant spread and containment, wind loads on buildings, pipe and duct design and numerous other applications.”

The grant was proposed to develop a computational fluid dynamics model of pulverized coal injection for the blast furnaces. The project will lay a solid foundation to develop a long-term R&D steel program as well as to expand applications to other industries, the proposal says.

In 2003, the university received a $1.29 million state grant develop a program that predicts where erosion is likely to occur in the lining of blast furnaces, allowing repairs to be made before a complete reline -- an extremely expensive process -- is needed.

The recent award will cover half the cost of the $400,500 project. Another half will be covered by the American Iron and Steel Institute. AISI, U.S. Steel and Ispat Inland Inc. are partnering on the project headed by Chenn Zhou, a Purdue Calumet professor of mechanical engineering.

Each month, the Desktop Engineering readers choose the most innovative product of the month and now it is possible to vote for the most innovative product of the year.

CFD-CADalyzer is an entirely new product that has been developed from the onset to be used by non-CFD specialists, typically design engineers, who rely on CAD at the early conceptual and detailed design stage of product development. It provides the design engineer with enhanced decision support by permitting rapid sequential or parallel CFD simulations to assess the potential performance of multiple design variants and alternatives. CFD-CADalyzer was developed with a number of high level requirements aimed at minimizing cost of ownership while maximizing utility, hence ROI.

Sincerely,
Mairi"

In addition to sales, RAND Worldwide, which is a leading global provider of engineering solutions and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) services and solutions, will be responsible for marketing, collateral material development, documentation, and packaging of the software. The Company will also provide users with complete implementation support, including curriculum development and training services. RAND Worldwide’s partner, ENGINEERING.com Incorporated, developer and owner of the ENGINEERING.com online resource and business for engineers, will provide e-business support for Boeing as well.

Computer simulations play an essential role in the study of liquids that contain particles of different sizes, which are commonly known as complex fluids. But the two main techniques for the atomistic simulation of liquids - the molecular dynamics technique and the Monte Carlo method - have limitations that greatly reduce their effectiveness.

'The main advantage of the molecular dynamics method - its ability to provide information about dynamical processes - is also its main limitation,' said Erik Luijten, a professor of materials science and engineering at Illinois. 'Many complex fluids contain particles of widely different sizes, which move at vastly different time scales. A simulation that faithfully captures the motions of the faster as well as the slower particles would be impracticably slow.'