The UK Turbulence Consortium is a group of academics and researchers from across eight universities, committed to undertaking high quality, world leading turbulence simulation and scientific research.  We use high performance computing systems, such as HECToR, to investigate fundamental aspects of turbulence problems using numerical simulations.  Cases include transitional and fully developed turbulent flows in canonical and complex geometries, with relevance to a wide range of engineering, environmental/geophysical and biological applications. 

The consortium was set up following a grant from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Science Research Council).  This initial funding came to an end in 2009 and we applied for and were awarded a further five years of funding.  As a consortium we aim to coordinate, augment and unify the research efforts of our participants, and to communicate our expertise and findings to an international audience.  This is done through a combination of publications, Annual Workshops/Conferences and our UKTC database.  Every September the group gathers for a conference at which recent work is reviewed. This year we are holding an extended 3 day conference to which the wider turbulence community is also invited.

As well as the funding coming directly to the consortium, members have been pursuing research topics, often initiated by contacts they made within the consortium, in separate grant applications to EPSRC. Examples are the Southampton–Cambridge joint projects, as well as the Imperial College (Morrison) and UMIST work (Craft) that have been funded explicitly to use simulation data arising from Consortium activities. Such inter-institutional activity is certainly stronger now than before the first consortia were formed, and demonstrates how the consortium is helping to create an environment whereby we can choose the right simulations to invest in and exploit these data once they have been validated, one of the key aims of the UKTC.

Government cuts to science research budgets over the last few years have threatened the ability of the UK to fully compete at a global level with other leading supercomputer technology turbulence centres such as NASA-Stanford Centre for Turbulent Research and the J.M. Burgers Centre.  The UK falls short in both investment in the technology and investment in staff, however we are confident that the strength of the consortium will enable us to compete at the global level.