Research IT

The Research IT Club is Back!

Are you interested in using mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, for real-time, interactive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – the simulation of fluid flow? If so then come along to our first club of the new academic year on the 11th of October! You can find out more about this and the opportunities that digital transformation could bring to the university.

The agenda and abstracts for the event are below. If you would like to attend the event on the 11th October at 2pm in Roscoe then please register.

Updates from the Research IT teams

  • Research Lifecycle Project
  • Research Infrastructure
  • Research Software Engineering

Using Android devices for accelerated, interactive simulation in engineering

Adrian R.G. Harwood, Lecturer in Virtual Engineering, School of Mechanical, Aerospace & Civil Engineering

Virtual engineering is an emerging field encompassing all aspects of engineering design and analysis within a computational environment. My work is concerned with developing the next generation of engineering simulation software embracing novel technology such as virtual and augmented reality, touch screens and haptic interfaces. Recently, my work has explored the use of mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, for real-time, interactive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – the simulation of fluid flow. Real-time CFD offers many time and cost benefits over traditional CFD with users perceiving the movement of flow ‘live’ and interacting with the running simulation, changing geometrical or physical parameters. However, real-time simulation inevitably requires a suitable compromise between accuracy and speed. Mobile devices are an affordable, pervasive computing resource with the potential for offering significant computing power if used as a networked cluster. In this talk, I will present developments towards real-time CFD on mobile platforms using calculations based on the lattice-Boltzmann Method.

The Digital University

Malcolm Whitehouse, Director of IT Services

This presentation covers the potential opportunities and challenges associated with digital transformation in Higher Education.

It does not attempt to prescribe what the University of Manchester should do at this point in time – albeit it does touch on some of the things we have started to put in place as capabilities towards being a digital university. Having digital projects and some point in time applications does not make an organisation digitally – but it is the ability to re-imagine an institution in light of technology and consider how we could do things to reinvent the way we do our core activities – that is at the heart of “digitalisation” – as opposed to the more mundane “digitisation”.