back to article Wind tunnels for fluid dynamics boffins among UKRI's £72M funding

The UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency is investing £72 million ($91.7 million) to build infrastructure to support next-generation technologies in energy, transportation, medicine, and astronomy. The agency has targeted four different projects, including building 11 wind tunnels and upgrading existing facilities for £23 …

  1. cookieMonster
    FAIL

    Jeez

    72 million?? Definitely will NOT ensure the UK is at the forefront of scientific discovery.

    What are these people smoking??

    1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: Jeez

      What are these people smoking??

      If you want them to be able to give more, persuade the Government to increase their budget..

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      if you're in UK government funded research

      then you have to say that each and every grant award will make the UK world leaders in X. It's ritualistic - like muslims intoning "inshalla"

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?

    Do they really need that many to develop simulation models? The whole ideas of using sims is to reduce dev time and costs, Shirley?

    1. McBread

      Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?

      Computational Fluid Dynamics is still very much a work in progress. The underlying equations, Navier-stokes, are not fully solvable, so we're stuck with approximations and simplifications. Some flow regions can be better simulated than others, but turbulence and flow separation are still a massive problem to predict accurately. And computing requirements can be huge. Tens or hundred of thousands cores for hours or days for the cutting edge highest fidelity simulations for answers that might be wrong. Computational and experimental aerodynamics still very much complement each other.

      1. LogicGate Silver badge

        Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?

        Yep, but 11! windtunnels for 23 mio.?

        Getting the air to move is one thing.. Getting calibrated measurements out of the experiment is something else, and the Hardware required is EXPENSIVE!.

        Also: seeing what we are talikng about NEW tunnels, these will have to enable research currently not possible with existing tunnels.

        There are many low speed tunnels available.

        The money is way of what is required for large scale trannsonic tunnels (when did you last see a 1:1 or 1:2 airliner in a tunnel?).

        I would therefore guess at high supersonic and hypersonic tunnels. Again a field where 23 mio. will not last very long.

        Is this seed money, marketing money, or is something going on which I can not account for?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?

          >>or is something going on

          I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is linked to the UK's chumocracy.

          Aside: How's that whole Teesside Freeport thing doing...?

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?

          when did you last see a 1:1 or 1:2 airliner in a tunnel?

          Why do that if you can accurately, and more cheaply, model it on a smaller scale?

      2. fishman

        Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?

        10 years ago I used a large eddy simulation code to analyze a simple cylinder in a flow - basically a 3D version of a 2D problem. It took 4 days using 128 cores to run it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Wind Tunnels. 11 of them?

          Are you suggesting the UK should invest in compute & semiconductors to improve on this?

  3. brakepad

    Wind tunnels

    "Massive tubes covered in channels for air to blow through" - not really sure what the 'covered in channels' is referring to - seems a bit misleading. Typically they are a tube, either open-ended or more commonly a closed-loop, with a fan inside blowing air through it. One area will be designated the working section or test section which is where the object being assessed will be placed. The scale can vary enormously, from a few square centimetres cross-section for some supersonic tunnels in education, to many metres for full-scale automotive testing.

    Decent introductory info in the Wikipedia article:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_tunnel

    1. Francis Boyle

      Puzzled me too

      Shades of "a series of tubes".

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wind tunnels

      Be interesting to see what regime they are planning for the wind tunnel. Given that there is already a good capability in the UK for putting civil aircraft models into a representative airflow and various wind tunnels and blower tunnels* used by car designers and others, one wonders whether the money is going in to a hypersonics capability.

      *blowers aren't closed loop. A closed loop can save energy, and some can be pressurised to make the airflow round a model match the airflow round a real aircraft a lot more accurately. (Reynold's number equivalence.)

  4. McBread

    The UK used to have a lot more large scale wind tunnels but they got shut down in the 80s/90s/00s. Bedford and Farnborough both had numerous wind tunnels operated by government research agencies, not to mention numerous industry ones dotted around. £72m would struggle to build one of these, so it's would seem to be regaining capability but on the smaller scale of university research tunnels.

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      The Bedford site is largely vacant. It had a fully working vertical wind tunnel and various buildings with horizontal wind tunnels. I’m sure this former RAE site could be cost effectively brought back into service.

      Unfortunately, I suspect the Flowrider has been removed…

      1. McBread

        RedBull are still operating once tunnel although there is a plan to replace it with a newer facility. I see the indoor skydiving company went bust last year; perhaps someone will revive it. The other tunnels, such as the world class 8ft transonic, got cut up for scrap so there's nothing to bring back.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          I would expect the skydiving groups would be investigating taking on the vertical wind tunnel given it's size (from memory you could practise 4 person formations in it) and reopen to members only.

          Yes, the horizontal tunnels were cut up, but the buildings - with the big round holes in are still there, so some potential for regeneration and new industry stimulation. However, given the aerospace industry largely died several decades back in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, would not be surprised if new tunnels get located at Bristol.

          One of the big challenges Twinwoods had was the accessibility of its location, being remote from motorways, railways and buses.

  5. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

    Wind tunnesl aside, what's going on with the picture that goes with this article?

    Presumably, it's supposed to show two "scientists" working in a lab. A few observations:

    - No lab I have ever seen has a wall high window like that

    - Why aren't they wearing goggles?

    - Do your lab coat up, it's there to protect you from spills, not as a fashion accessory

    - Don't wave your arms around with unsecured beakers of "reagent" lying around like that

    - Ever heard of a fume hood? Even if they're not using them right now, it's a pretty shit lab with no containment.

    - So much blue liquid

    - WTF is your laptop doing on the bench, it should be in the clean room?

    I could go on, but I fear I may have overstated my point already...

    1. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

      Re: Wind tunnesl aside, what's going on with the picture that goes with this article?

      I dunno, I have photos of my father-in-law in a similar environment with nice big single-glazed windows where he's doing things with nuclear stuff and not even with the lab-coat. This was in the '70s, mind you.

      1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        Re: Wind tunnesl aside, what's going on with the picture that goes with this article?

        To be fair, when handling lumps of "spicy rocks*," a fume hood isn't going to make a great deal of difference. Splashy things, and things that give off gases that might not be entirely healthy to breathe require appropriate precautions.

        Back when I were a lad, in the mists of time, and I did such things, we kept two lab books, one for the experimental write-up, and one for all the risk and COSHH assessments. The second one was deemed more important, especially since the contents of the first were likely to be a litany of experimental failures...

        *Thanks to the poster a few weeks a go who used this idiom, I am now stealing it.

        1. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

          Re: Wind tunnesl aside, what's going on with the picture that goes with this article?

          The contraptions in the photos have lots of tubes and... things. I dunno what they're for, though. I tried reading his notes and they just made my head hurt; something to do with making spicy rocks faster, I think. I'm going to have to steal that phrase too.

          1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge
            Coat

            Re: Wind tunnesl aside, what's going on with the picture that goes with this article?

            We'll have to be careful to moderate the use of the phrase, lest it lead to a runaway reaction...

  6. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    $10 million will be spent on building the ELT

    The merely Very Large Telescope cost > €1bn in the 90s

    10million won't build an instrument for ELT

    1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

      Re: $10 million will be spent on building the ELT

      It should be immediately apparent to anyone who knows how much things actually cost, that the numbers announced are ones that sound large to people likely to vote Tory ($10M would have been a lot of money when they retired), but are actually very small in the scale of things.

      Actual numbers needed to do anything useful are in the tens or hundreds of billions, not millions. These are the sorts of numbers the other sort of people likely to vote Tory are intimately familiar with, and are desperate to remain intimately familiar with via the use of tax havens...

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: $10 million will be spent on building the ELT

        The government announces 100 guineas of funding for boffins and a shiny sixpence will be given to each urchin at Christmas

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