Professor C.P.T. Groth  University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies 4925 Dufferin St., Ontario, Canada M3H 5T6 Phone:   +1-416-667-7715 Fax:       +1-416-667-7799          Email:     groth (at_sign) utias.utoronto.ca Web:      Click Here

Prof. Clinton Groth is a computational fluid dynamicist with extensive expertise in parallel adaptive mesh refinement finite-volume schemes for compressible and turbulent reacting flows. He is a leading researcher in high-performance computing and the development of reliable and robust numerical solution techniques for combustion modelling, including the application of large-eddy simulation (LES) techniques to compressible and reactive turbulent flows. He is the author and co-author of nearly forty journal articles and more than one hundred conference papers, he has been involved in organizing both national and international conferences, and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Society of Canada, as well as the SciNet Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) at the University of Toronto.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has proved to be an important enabling technology in many areas of science and engineering, including aerospace engineering. Moreover, the rapid advances in high-performance computing systems over the last 10-15 year has led to the development of terascale and, very recently, petascale parallel clusters, and these are, are, in turn, creating significant opportunities for the application of CFDto a wide range of problems. Nevertheless, there remain a variety of physically-complex flows, which are still not well understood and have proved to be very challenging to predict by numerical methods. Such flows would include but are not limited to: (i) multiphase, turbulent, and combusting flows encountered in propulsion systems (e.g., gas turbine engines and rocket motors); (ii) compressible flows of conducting fluids and plasmas; and (iii) micro-scale non-equilibrium flows, such as those encountered in micro-electromechanical systems. These flows present numerical challenges for they generally involve a wide range of complicated physical/chemical phenomena, exhibit strong anisotropic solution features, as well as involve complex flow geometries. Advances in numerical methods are required to fully exploit current and future, terascale and petascale, computing platforms and thereby enable the reliable and routine solution of physically-complex flows for a greater range of practical engineering applications.

With this view in mind, the focus of Prof. Groth's CFD and Propulsion group is on the investigation and development of novel parallel high-order finite-volume and hybrid adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) schemes for predicting physically-complex flows. Key elements of the research include: (i) development of AMR and embedded mesh strategies for treatment of complex geometries and interfaces using hybrid multi-block meshes consisting of both body-fitted and more generally unstructured grid blocks; (ii) development of anisotropic mesh refinement techniques based on dual-weighted reconstruction and residual error estimates; (iii) design of efficient and scalable parallel implementations with two-levels of parallelism - coarse-grain parallelization via domain decomposition and fine-grain parallelization for more effective use of multi-core systems and floating-point accelerators; (iv) development of improved parallel implicit AMR formulations based on a Newton-Krylov-Schwarz (NKS) approach; and (v) enhancements of high-order finite-volume spatial discretization procedures for improved solution accuracy. The potential of the proposed parallel AMR methodology are being demonstrated through application to a range of problems in numerical combustion modelling (from the prediction of laminar flame structure under conditions of low-gravity and high pressure to LES of both premixed and non-premixed turbulent reactive flows) and to the prediction of non-equilibrium micro-channel and plasma flows.