Civil Engineering: Fully Funded UKRI and Swansea University PhD Scholarship: The Development of Web-Based Software Integration Tools for Engineering Simulation

Funding providers: UKRI and Swansea University

Subject areas: Computational Engineering/ Machine Learning

Project start date: 

• 1 April 2024 (Enrolment open from mid–March) 
• 1 July 2024 (Enrolment open from mid-June) 

Project supervisors: 

• Professor Oubay Hassan
• Professor Ruben Sevilla

Aligned programme of study: PhD in Civil Engineering

Mode of study: Full-time

Project description: 

Traditionally, numerical simulation tools (CFD, FEM, etc.) generally fall into two categories: 

• Commercial software - These tend to be easy to install and use but are very expensive. They are also quite inflexible as you are locked into the tools that particular vendor provides.
• Open-source tools - These are free and extremely flexible but require specialist expertise to install, setup and use, especially if you want to integrate several different tools into your workflow. This complexity further increases if the problem size requires the use of HPC platforms. Here the setup and usage of such platforms is bewildering to the typical PC user.

The cost of commercial software, and the expertise required to use open-source tools, often prevents organisations that only require numerical simulation periodically, such as SMEs, being able to utilise them to assist in the design of their products. 

WebSim is an on-line, interactive platform, developed in Swansea, that aims to provide an easy to use and flexible simulation framework. Currently WebSim, has a simple CAD functionality, a state-of-the-art mesh generation capability which acts as a generic pre-processing step to performing numerical simulations across a wide range of domains. 

The goal of this project is to complete WebSim’s capabilities by: 

• Developing innovative methods to enable end-users to integrate their choice of simulation software into the WebSim environment.
• Enabling this software to be easily executed and monitored in the cloud, or on the user’s choice of HPC platform.
• Developing an on-line “Sim Store” which would act as a marketplace bringing together users that have integrated third-party tools with users that need to use them.

This PhD project would enable WebSim to create meaningful impact by being made freely available to SMEs and larger organisations such as Universities.