Numerical modeling is today a very powerful tool in the fields of engineering and science when it comes to solving complex problems. Aware of this reality, the Environmental Physics Laboratory Ephyslab of the Marine Research Center of the University of Vigo has been working for years on the application of this type of model to coastal protection and the design of wave energy capture devices. This was explained this Tuesday by researcher Alejandro Cabrera in a new edition of the Café con Sal series.
In his speech, Cabrera presented his research work within the DualSPHysics project, a free and open source project promoted by the Ephyslab group in collaboration with specialists from different institutions in the United Kingdom, Portugal, Italy and Belgium. He focused, above all, on different coastal engineering applications, such as the design of port protection structures and the numerical design of wave energy harvesting devices.
As he explained in the talk, the main advantage of using this type of model is the ability to simulate any scenario without the need to build expensive physical models, since numerical models do not have to worry about scaling problems. In addition, numerical simulation provides data or measurements that would be difficult to obtain or even impossible to measure in a real model. On the other hand, this working method allows, as the researcher emphasized, to carry out a prior study to reduce the number of physical tests, which implies a significant saving of time and money.
The next Café con Sal will be on May 21
The next Café con Sal will be on Tuesday, May 21st and will be led by Gianluca Mariño, researcher at the Marine and Environmental Geology Group of the CIM-UVigo and honorary professor at The Australian National University. Under the title The nature of (palaeo) climate change, the researcher will present the main characteristics of ice age cycles, the characterization of the variability pattern and its causes, as well as some considerations for exploiting the paleoclimate record in climate sensitivity studies.
