Modelling Software

From AMCGMedia

Over the past 15 years the Applied Modelling and Computation Group has been actively developing advanced numerical methods for the solution of a wide variety of physical phenomena in engineering and physical sciences. These phenomena include the radiation exchange between clouds; oceanographic flows; transient nuclear system behaviour; and multiphase flows in fluidised beds. This research has culminated in the development of two main finite element based codes:

Fluidity an open-source, multiphase flow modelling application, together with important derivatives such as ICOM, and
EVENT for neutral particle radiation

These software modelling tools represent the state of the art in finite element methods development, and utilise the latest advanced iterative solution techniques.

Fluidity

Fluidity is a general purpose multiphase CFD code which is capable of modelling a wide range of fluid phenomena involving single and multiphase flows. Fluidity has been applied to modelling fluidised beds and 3D ocean modelling (see below). Fluidity also forms the fluids module of the coupled radiation/hydrodynamics code FETCH for modelling the criticality of fissile solutions. It is release under a GNU General Public License.

Fluidity-ICOM is the ocean modelling implementation of Fluidity and has been developed as a next generation model, robust in its application to coupled scales from global to coastal to process. Together with innovative treatment of bathymetry using surface conforming finite elements, the use of unstructured adaptive meshing in parallel allows the method to optimally reveal physical details with the aid of user defined error fields. The mesh and hence computational resources are concentrated only when and where required by the physics and relaxed elsewhere.


Salt fingering on an adaptive mesh.	Grand Banks tsunami simulation.	Palaeo-hydrodynamics.	Density currents with rotation.

Event

The code EVENT is a general purpose finite element neutral particle radiation transport code and has been used to model radiation exchange in atmospheres, complex radiation shielding problems and near infrared optical tomography. EVENT also forms the radiation module of the coupled radiation/hydrodynamics code FETCH, used for modelling the criticality of fissile solutions. More information about EVENT....

FETCH

The code FETCH was developed in order to model process criticality accidents involving fissile solutions, porous media and granular material - together with large-scale coupled behaviour of innovative nuclear reactors. FETCH consists of three modules: a radiation module EVENT; a fluids module Fluidity and a linking module which provides the interface between the radiation and fluids modules.

Spud

Spud is a generic system for defining, writing and processing options files for scientific computer models.

QGIS meshing plugins

Realistic domains can be meshed using the QGIS meshing plugins. See the meshing pages for further details.

Terreno

Terreno uses a 2D anisotropic mesh optimisation algorithm to explicitly optimise for element quality and bathymetric approximation while minimising the number of mesh elements created. The shoreline used in the mesh generation process is the result of a polyline approximation algorithm that where the minimum length of the resulting edges is considered as well as the distance an edge is from a vertex on the original shoreline segment being approximated. The underlying philosophy is that meshing and approximation should be error driven and should minimise user intervention.

GEM and PLOTTER

Data interfacing and visualisation are provided by the in-house software GEM and PLOTTER. GEM is a mesh generator and data preprocessing tool for EVENT. PLOTTER is a visualisation tool used within the group.