Profile

Currently I am researching about platooning. This is a concept about vehicles following closely behind (tailgating) which has been proven to reduce fuel consumption, reduce carbon foot print, increase safety amongst other benefits. My area of research is aimed at understanding airflow and the sound generated by the airflow in these platoons and to improve them. I conduct computer simulations, wind tunnel experiments and analyse data. I also work with Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and 3D printers for my work (integrating sensors, parts of models, etc.) as well as my hobby projects. I also like volunteering and have helped mentor students, advise in F1 in schools, delivering short tutorials from KS2 to 3rd year university students.

I conduct computer simulations to study airflow around vehicles but these are very resource intensive. So they need special high powered computers to run in. I currently use part of one which has 256 high powered cores and this still takes around 5 days to simulate 0.25 seconds of a simulation. I also try to replicate these experimentally to validate my simulations and then it is a lot of number crunching (terabytes of data). I use a lot of specialised software as well as Python coding for this. I sometimes have to design my own sensors and systems for sensors as there are no off the shelf ones available. This is where a lot of my Arduinos, Pis and 3D modelling and printing work is done. Most of my time is spent on preparing simulations/experiments or analysing data. The actual simulations and experiments take the least amount of time (which was surprising when I started).

I tend to lose track of time when I get immersed in work and love working at night (I have always found it easy to concentrate at night).