A natural extension of the conventional finite volume method into polygonal unstructured meshes for CFD application.

A new general cell-centered solution procedure based upon the conventional control or finite volume (CV or FV) approach has been developed for numerical heat transfer and fluid flow which encompasses both structured and unstructured meshes for any kind of mixed polygon cell. Unlike conventional FV methods for structured and block structured meshes and both FV and FE methods for unstructured meshes, the irregular control volume (ICV) method does not require the shape of the element or cell to be predefined because it simply exploits the concept of fluxes across cell faces. That is, the ICV method enables meshes employing mixtures of triangular, quadrilateral, and any other higher order polygonal cells to be exploited using a single solution procedure. The ICV approach otherwise preserves all the desirable features of conventional FV procedures for a structured mesh; in the current implementation, collocation of variables at cell centers is used with a Rhie and Chow interpolation (to suppress pressure oscillation in the flow field) in the context of the SIMPLE pressure correction solution procedure. In fact all other FV structured mesh-based methods may be perceived as a subset of the ICV formulation. The new ICV formulation is benchmarked using two standard computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems i.e., the moving lid cavity and the natural convection driven cavity. Both cases were solved with a variety of structured and unstructured meshes, the latter exploiting mixed polygonal cell meshes. The polygonal mesh experiments show a higher degree of accuracy for equivalent meshes (in nodal density terms) using triangular or quadrilateral cells; these results may be interpreted in a manner similar to the CUPID scheme used in structured meshes for reducing numerical diffusion for flows with changing direction.

Extending the capabilities of the buildingEXODUS evacuation model to cater for hospital evacuations

This paper describes the extension of the building EXODUS evacuation model in order to: allow occupants to be assigned a limited set of tasks, display co-operation

An extension of Purcell's vector method with applications to panel element equations

The classical Purcell's vector method, for the construction of solutions to dense systems of linear equations is extended to a flexible orthogonalisation procedure. Some properties are revealed of the orthogonalisation procedure in relation to the classical Gauss-Jordan elimination with or without pivoting. Additional properties that are not shared by the classical Gauss-Jordan elimination are exploited. Further properties related to distributed computing are discussed with applications to panel element equations in subsonic compressible aerodynamics. Using an orthogonalisation procedure within panel methods enables a functional decomposition of the sequential panel methods and leads to a two-level parallelism.

Practitioners’ perception of the impact of the vision of policy-makers on practice: The example of the recommendations of the Moser Commission

This paper presents the perception of practitioners of the impact of the Moser Committee recommendations and the Skills for Life agenda it generated. The paper further explores areas of convergence and divergence between practitioners’ perceptions and the underpinning values of the Moser Committee recommendations. The study utilised a range of research tools including an online questionnaire, documentary analysis and elements of discourse analysis in the collection and analysis of data. It found that there is substantial divergence between the perception of practitioners and the values underpinning policy. It concludes by suggesting that a varying perception of what constitutes sustainable education and the lack of input from practitioners into policy might be responsible for this significant divergence of opinion and also raised a question on the perceived role of practitioners in the policy‐making process.