This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Shooting for the stars
Professor Brian Cox, Lewis Hamilton, Elon Musk, and Powerhouse Energy Group Plc. What do they have in common? You may need to watch the TV show “Only Connect” to get the answer, but it’s Computerised Fluid Dynamics – known as CFD to its followers.
“What?”, you say. Well, Tesla and Spacex use CFD a lot; so does the Mercedes F1 team, and Brian Cox is a professor at the University of Manchester where its Manchester CFD Group is another shining star (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9lGCFSS8XM). Powerhouse, the engineering services company that is promoting the use of pyrolysis to turn end-of-life plastic into hydrogen and other industrial gases using its DMG technology, has teamed up with the Manchester CFD Group to perfect the design of its Thermal Conversion Chamber.
CFD is a powerful computer-based simulation, analysis, and visualisation tool that provides a revolutionary alternative to conventional design methods for calculation of the flow of liquids or gases – all done in 3D and at real-life scale without having to build anything physical. It can assess the interaction of multiple phenomena that occur in fluids such as velocity, temperature and thermodynamic effects, pressures, and even the effect of phase changes such as in the Powerhouse case, the material phase change as the plastic changes from solid to liquid and then into a gas. The computer modelling breaks the fluid volume into small elements that are composed into a matrix. CFD has many uses, including weather forecasting, aerospace, the motor industry, and even the creation of visual effects. Powerhouse is using it to optimise performance, maximise energy recovery, and perfect the internal geometry of its Thermal Conversion Chamber (TCC) before it goes into production at Mitchell Dryers, near Carlisle (https://mitchelldryers.co.uk/ ).
Dr Andy Physick, Powerhouse’s Head of Technology said “We have been working with the Manchester CFD Group since the beginning of the year and have made some great progress. The TCC is where it all happens, and the hydrogen produced. Using CFD is not only enabling us to perfect it in a way that we otherwise could not do without actually building a facility. We would then have to go back in and cut and weld to make the changes. This way, we do it ahead of building anything.
The work to date is demonstrating that the TCC will work effectively, and we now think we will be able to make it even more cost-effective on future units. Using CFD also means that when our new test unit is built at the Technical Innovation Centre next year, we will be able to push the performance of DMG even further. We will be able to identify an improvement and test it on the small unit before committing to manufacture.”
The relationship with the Manchester CFD Group has worked so well that the two teamed up again for a grant application to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for a new way of separating the hydrogen from the syngas produced in the TCC. The application was successful, and the research work has been funded. This new technique could save millions in the cost of Powerhouse’s DMG facilities. Whilst Brian Cox gazes at the stars, Powerhouse is taking the Elon Musk route to get there.